In ILE COBOL an item of class date-time, or a numeric-edited item, could be based in whole or in part on a locale. For example, a date item could be defined like:
01 group-item. 05 date1 FORMAT DATE SIZE 10 LOCALE is locale-french.
In this case the format of the date item and the CCSID of the characters that will form the contents of the date item will be based on the locale locale-french.
To create a locale, the locale must be described with a locale source member. Locale source is similar to COBOL source. It has a certain number of sections with predefined syntax and semantics, and just like COBOL source, must be compiled to form a locale object. To create a locale object, a CCSID must be specified, along with the locale source member name, file, and library. For more information on creating locales, see Creating Locales on the iSeries.
This means that the COBOL data item date1 could have a CCSID different than the job CCSID. The ILE source debugger has no way to determine the CCSID of date1, so it converts the CCSID of the data item to the job CCSID. This may cause the contents of the data item to display incorrectly. To see the correct contents of these types of data items, you can display them in hexadecimal. For example, to see the contents of date1 in hexadecimal, you would type:
EVAL date-1:x
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