EGL character types

The next table lists the simple character types. Noted here is the encoding, which is a mapping of each display character such as “A” and the related binary value such as 01000001. The code page is a table of such encodings and is important for globalization.

Type Meaning of n Limits Value or reference type? Comments

BYTES, BYTES(n)

    BYTES is a reference type, BYTES(n) is a value type.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

CHAR(n)

Number of one-byte characters, with single-byte blanks used as padding, if necessary.

n <= 32767. Value.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

Encoding is by the local code page.

DBCHAR(n)

Number of two-byte characters, with double-byte blanks used as padding, if necessary.

n <= 16383. Value.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

Encoding is by the local code page.

HEX(n)

Number of four-bit HEX digits, with binary zeros used as padding, if necessary.

n <= 65534; the n must be even. Value.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

The only valid characters are the hexadecimal digits 0-9, a-f, and A-F.

MBCHAR(n)

Number of one-byte characters; with single-byte characters used as padding; however, an instance typically includes one- and two-byte characters.

n <= 32767. Value.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

Encoding is by the local code page.
STRING,

STRING(n)

Number of characters.

n >= 1; here, n represents a limit on length, making STRING(n) similar to the SQL VARCHAR type. Reference. A value of type STRING(n) is not padded automatically with blanks. The n is only a limit.

UNICODE(n)

Number of two-byte UNICODE characters, with UNICODE characters used as padding.

n <= 16383. Value.

Not implemented in Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

Encoding is UNICODE; specifically, UTF-16.

Compatibility considerations

Platform Issue
JavaScript generation The reference types STRING and STRING(n) are the only supported character types.