If national items cannot be used, and standard alphanumeric items are used instead, special characters are handled by the Framework according to the current encoding set in the environment. To force the Framework to use a particular encoding overriding the operating system settings, you must set the file.encoding Java property. For example, in order to force UTF-8 as current encoding for the COBOL application, you add the following entry to the runtime command-line:

When managing special characters using standard alphanumeric items, you must pay attention to offsets. For example, if you reference a variable by specifying offset and length between parenthesis, like:

consider that 2 means the second byte and not the second digit, so, if the first character of var needs two or more bytes to be represented with the current encoding, the result of the COBOL operation will be a truncated string.

The Java file.encoding is also useful at compile time. If you have special characters in your source code and their ASCII value doesn’t match with the current operating system encoding, you should tell the compiler about it. For example, in order to compile a source written on Linux using UTF-8 on a Windows system where the system encoding is not UTF-8, you can use: