The term alphanumeric field is used here to cover all alphanumeric, alphabetic and alphanumeric-edited fields. For the purposes of an ACCEPT statement, an alphanumeric-edited field is treated as an alphanumeric field of the same length. Any insertion symbols such as the forward slash character (/) or zero are ignored and treated as an X. Therefore, a field defined as PIC XX0XX0XX is treated as if it was specified as PIC X(8).
If the field is defined as alphabetic, only the characters "A" to "Z", "a" to "z" and space are allowed into the field.
The cursor is initially placed at the start of the field.
As data is entered into the field, the cursor advances to the next character. The cursor can be moved back over the data in the field using the cursor keys, and editing functions such as backspace and delete are provided.