International Character Handling

International character translation is supported in AcuServer environments. The translation process is handled by the client runtime, which uses an XFD (eXtended File Descriptor) and a user-defined map file to accomplish the translation. See International Character Handling in the ACUCOBOL-GT User’s Guide for a detailed description of international character handling.

To take advantage of international character mapping support you must:

• Create an XFD for each data file that contains fields that you want to have translated.

  Use the -Fx or -Fa compile option to create an XFD file. Note that only fields of type CHARACTER can be translated. See Compiler and Runtime in the ACUCOBOL-GT User’s Guide for more information.

• Create a map file.

  The map file specifies the values that characters are translated into before being passed to the server or translated back from before being passed to the program. The map file can map any character value in the range 0 to 255. Map files are described in detail in International Character Handling in the ACUCOBOL-GT User’s Guide.

• On the client, set the DEFAULT_MAP_FILE or server_MAP_FILE configuration variable to point to your map file (see Appendix H of Book 4 of the ACUCOBOL-GT documentation set).