National Hexadecimal Literals

National hexadecimal literals specify the Unicode (UTF-16) characters directly in hexadecimal, and enable the portability of code. Use the following format:

NX"string"

Each character in the string consists of two bytes and the most significant byte of the pair is specified first. For example, in UTF-16 the character "A" is represented by the byte pair (0x00, 0x41) and the character "B" is represented by (0x00, 0x42). The string "AB" could therefore be specified by the national hexadecimal literal:

NX"00410042"

See the section National Literals in the chapter Concepts of the COBOL Language in your Language Reference.