DBCHAR

An item of type DBCHAR is interpreted as a series of double-byte characters. The length reflects the number of characters and ranges from 1 to 16383. To determine the number of bytes, double the length value.

Workstation platforms like Windows 2000 use the ASCII character set; mainframe platforms like z/OS UNIX System Services use the EBCDIC character set. Differences in collating sequence generally cause greater-than and less-than comparisons to have different results in the two types of environments.

DBCS data is ideographic, as is necessary to display Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, for example. Display of such data requires a terminal device with DBCS capability.

Related reference
Primitive types