Character (n) Varying

Character (n) Varying is a character-string variable. The VARYING attribute causes the string variable to hold values of varying length. The representation of a varying string variable in storage is such that any string up to n characters may be held by the variable, and the length of the current string is retained as part of the value. Character (n) Varying is stored as follows: the first two bytes contain the length of the string (represented by a Fixed Binary (15) number) followed by a sequence of 8-bit ASCII characters stored as 1 character per byte. In Open PL/I, the maximum length of a string value is 32767 characters.

Note that the character string is not terminated with a null (ASCII 0) character.