SET Statement

Overview

The SET statement has been extended to take the Encoding Type attribute of an alpha field into consideration. All Alpha fields in existing applications developed prior to the implementation of Unicode support have an Encoding Type of “Raw”. Group fields also have an implied Encoding Type of “Raw”. To ensure compatibility of existing applications, the behavior of the SET statement should be the same as it always has been when the statement involves Raw or Group fields and the other field types.

The following outlines specifies the behavior of the SET statement when one or both of the operands have an Encoding Type value of “NATIONAL” or “UNICODE”.

SET from RAW Alpha:

• To RAW Alpha or Group
  • The current behavior has not been changed.
• To UNICODE or NATIONAL Alpha
  • Each byte of data in the RAW alpha source field is transcoded from an 8859-15 character to the equivalent UTF-32 character in the range U+0000 thru U+00FF and is then set into the corresponding character position in the UTF-32 encoded destination field.

Bugs

1. Bug: Setting a Unicode alpha field equal to a Token field does not work. It appears to do a byte by byte set, not a character set of the Token string. (Note CNV TEXT does work)

-- SteveFrizzell - 2011-03-07