The NATIONAL-OF Function

The NATIONAL-OF function returns a character string containing the national character internal representation of the characters in the argument.

The type of the function is national.

General Format

Argument-1 must be of class alphabetic or class alphnumeric. If alphanumeric, it may contain alphanumeric characters or national characters in external format, or both.
Argument-2 must be of category national and must be one character in length. Argument-2 specifes a national substitution character for use in conversion of alphanumeric characters for which there is no corresponding national character.
Must be an integer. Argument-2 identifies the source code page for the conversion. Currently beyond the default codepage only 1208 is supported.

A character string is returned with each alphanumeric character and each national character in argument-1 converted to its corresponding national internal format. Any control functions used for external format representation in argument-1 are recognised only for purposes of distinguishing characters, and are not be considered as separate characters of argument-1.
If argument-2 is specified, each character in argument-1 that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted to the substitution character specified by argument-2.
If argument-2 is unspecified, each character that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted to a national space.
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The length of the returned value is the number of character positions of usage national required to hold the converted argument and depends on the number of characters contained in argument-1.