HELP: Read character data from memory
TYPE: OBJECT
SYNTAX: CHAR(BLKSIZE=num,CCSID='str'/DEFAULT/ASCII/EBCDIC/BOMUTF/BOMUCS/SYSTEM/LOCAL,CHRMODE=STOP/IGNORE/SUBSTITUTE/IDENTITY/TRANSLIT,SKIPEQUAL,USRTABLE='str'/NPAS/SEPA/DELA/DLAX,ONEMAP,COMBINED=NFD/NFC/AUTO/ON/OFF,BOM,KEEPBOM,ENL2LF,DECODE=NONE/FIODEC/CRYDEC/CMPDEC/ALWAYS,DECRYPT[{}...],TABLE(),AVSCAN())
Format char reads the byte stream for character conversion. There is no delimiter parsing. The data stream is simply split into block elements defined by the block size parameter.
The character data is converted from the provided CCSID to UTF-8. If no CCSID is provided, a system-dependent process is used to find the default CCSID. First, if available, the stored CCSID from the filesystem is used. If this is not successful, the environment variable LANG is used to determine the default CCSID. If this fails too, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) is used on a ASCII and IBM-1047 (Open Systems Latin-1) on EBCDIC systems.
During the character conversion, these options are supported:
SWITCH: SKIPEQUAL - Skip conversion if formats are equal (e.g. UTF-8 to UTF-8)SWITCH: KEEPBOM - Keep byte order mark for faster conversionNUMBER: DECODE=NONE/FIODEC/CRYDEC/CMPDEC/ALWAYS - Decode encoded data first (remove base encodings)
NONE - No automated decodingFIODEC - Base decoding after file IO, before decryptionCRYDEC - Base decoding after decryption, before decompressionCMPDEC - Base decoding after decompression, before formatting if XMLALWAYS - Always decode encoded data (like CMPDEC but also if CHAR or TEXT)