COBOL Question - UNICODE

Question

We are currently looking to convert our legacy COBOL code from ANSII to UNICODE however we have come across a problem where just changing the PIC X fields to PIC N and setting NSYMBOL(NATIONAL) will cause problems when data structures contain a REDEFINES or RENAME statement with elementary DATA items using PIC 9 fields.

01 WS-RECORD PIC N(26).
01 WS-RECORD-1 REDEFINES WS-RECORD.
02 WS-NUM PIC 9(6).
02 WS-DATA PIC N(20).

MOVE N"123456ABCDEFGHIJKLM" TO WS-RECORD.

In the above the string being moved will be in UTF-16 format, therefore the field WS-NUM will be corrupt as it will contain X"310032003300" which is an invalid numeric, WS-DATA will contain X"3400350036004100..etc

The question is, when using NATIONAL (UTF-16) data types how can numerics be handled so as to get the correct data after it has been redefined.

I can sort of get this to work doing the following but will get invalid data in other WS-RECORD.

MOVE 123456 TO WS-NUM.
MOVE N"ABCDEFGHIJKLM" TO WS_DATA.

The above will be correct, however if I examine WS-RECORD I will see ???ABCDEFGHIJKLM where ??? is X"313233343536" in hexi-decimal.

Our problem is that we have multiple data records depending on the record type identifier, we also use redefines on many of our LINKAGE ITEMS.

Has anyone had experience moving from legacy ASCII to UNICODE?

Answer 1

02 WS-NUM PIC 9(6) USAGE NATIONAL.

Should work (at least on IBM compilers).