The DISPLAY-OF Function

The DISPLAY-OF function returns a character string containing the alphanumeric character representation - the external format representation - of the national characters in the argument.

The type of the function is alphanumeric.

General Format

Arguments

Argument-1 must be of class national.
Argument-2 must be of class alphabetic or alphanumeric and must be one character position in length. Argument-2 specifies an alphanumeric substitution character for use in conversion of national characters for which there is no corresponding alphanumeric character.
Must be an integer. Argument-2 identifies the source code page for the conversion. Full support for a CCSID value other than 1208 (UTF-8) requires the installation of the appropriate IBM CCSID conversion table; see Installing CCSID Tables for more information. The table name required for a CCSID of nnn is IBM-nnn. For example, to support a CCSID value of 37, you should install table IBM-37. If the required table is not installed, the conversion is carried out using the default EBCDIC or ASCII code page (according to whether the given CCSID is EBCDIC or not).

Returned Values

A character string is returned with each national character of argument-1 converted to its corresponding alphanumeric character representation, if any. The correspondence of characters between the alphanumeric character set and the national character set depends on the native environment.
If argument-2 is specified, the alphanumeric substitution character is returned for each national character in argument-1 that has no corresponding alphanumeric character representation.
If argument-2 is unspecified, each national character in argument-1 that has no corresponding alphanumeric character representation is returned in national external format, with the minimum of control functions necessary for interpretation of the external format characters.
The length of the returned value is the number of character positions of usage display required to hold the returned value; it is dependent on the characters in the argument and on the attributes of the national character set.