Character-strings: COBOL words and literals

A character-string is a character or a sequence of contiguous characters that forms a COBOL word, a literal, a PICTURE character-string, or a comment-entry. A character-string is delimited by separators.

A separator is a string of contiguous characters used to delimit character strings. Separators are described in detail under Separators.

Character strings and certain separators form text words. A text word is a character or a sequence of contiguous characters (possibly continued across lines) between character positions 8 and 72 inclusive in source text, library text, or pseudo-text. For more information about pseudo-text, see Pseudo-text.

Source text, library text, and pseudo-text can be written in single-byte EBCDIC and, for some character-strings, DBCS. (The compiler cannot process source code written in ASCII or Unicode.)

You can use single-byte and double-byte character-strings to form the following items:

  • COBOL words
  • Literals
  • Comment text

You can use only single-byte characters to form PICTURE character-strings.