The NATIONAL-OF Function

The NATIONAL-OF function returns a character string containing the national character internal representation of the characters in the argument.

The type of the function is national.

General Format

Argument-1 must be of class alphabetic, alphanumeric
, or UTF-8¹
. If alphanumeric, it may contain alphanumeric characters or national characters in external format, or both.
Argument-2 must be of category national and must be one character in length. Argument-2 specifies a national substitution character for use in conversion of alphanumeric characters for which there is no corresponding national character.
Argument-2 must be an integer value representing a CCSID conversion table, which identifies the source code page for the conversion. If argument-2 is omitted and argument-1 is of class UTF-8, a value of 1208 is assumed.
Argument-2 must identify a valid EBCDIC, ASCII, UTF-8, or EUC code page. (EBCDIC or ASCII code pages can contain both single-byte and double-byte characters.)

Full support for a CCSID value other than 1208 (UTF-8) requires the installation of the appropriate IBM CCSID conversion table; see Installing CCSID Tables for more information. The table name required for a CCSID of nnn is IBM-nnn. For example, to support a CCSID value of 37, you should install table IBM-37. If the required table is not installed, the conversion is carried out using the default EBCDIC or ASCII code page (according to whether the given CCSID is EBCDIC or not).

A character string is returned with each alphanumeric character and each national character in argument-1 converted to its corresponding national internal format. Any control functions used for external format representation in argument-1 are recognised only for purposes of distinguishing characters, and are not be considered as separate characters of argument-1.
If argument-2 is specified, each character in argument-1 that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted to the substitution character specified by argument-2.
If argument-2 is unspecified, each character that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted to a national space.
.
The length of the returned value is the number of character positions of usage national required to hold the converted argument and depends on the number of characters contained in argument-1.