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Appendix E. Coded character set identifiers (CCSIDs) in
Query for iSeries
This appendix contains information about coded character set identifiers or CCSIDs. This information will
help you understand CCSIDs and why they are important to Query for iSeries.
A CCSID is a 2-byte (unsigned) integer that uniquely identifies an encoding scheme and one or more pairs
of character sets and code pages. A CCSID can be assigned to each query definition, data field, and
collating sequence. A CCSID can also be assigned to individual items in a file record format definition,
such as the column heading, text description, edit word, or long comment for a field.
CCSID-marked data can be converted so that it looks the same in languages that use the same character
set or superset of the character set (see Figure 7 on page 246). Data will not look the same without
conversion if the code pages differ. The hexadecimal value for a graphic character (a character that is
displayed or printed) in one language may be different than the value for the equivalent character in
another language. The problem does not end with displaying and printing. If data is collated using a
sequence prepared from characters in a different code page, or if data in different code pages is
compared without being converted, the result will seem incorrect.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2000, 2002 245