COBOL_CHARACTER_SET

The Windows runtime terminal manager includes built-in Unicode support. For all screen I/O, the data is dynamically converted from the system code page, using UTF-16 encoding. COBOL_CHARACTER_SET enables you to override this, and can take one of the following pre-defined values:

OEM

All data in the COBOL program is encoded in the OEM (DOS) character set.

ANSI

All data in the COBOL program is encoded in the current ANSI code page character set.

UTF-8

All data in the COBOL program is encoded in Unicode (UTF-8 format).

Note: As this is a multi-byte character set, you may need to expand some of your data variables to account for the larger size.

This configuration variable can also take a numeric value, which means that all data in the COBOL program is encoded in the ANSI code page with that value. For example, 437 is used in the United States. (Setting this variable to ANSI is the same as setting it to the value of the current code page.)

Visit the following web page for a list of supported code pages: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd317756(v=vs.85).aspx

You can use this variable to dynamically change the specified character set if your data uses a mixture of formats; for example, data read from an XML file might be in UTF-8 format, while the rest of the data in your program might be in ANSI format.

By default, this variable is not set.