Guardian Procedure Calls Reference Manual (G06.25+)

Guardian Procedure Calls (M)
Guardian Procedure Calls Reference Manual—522629-013
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MBCS_EXTERNAL_TO_TANDEM_Procedure
Considerations
•
All parameters except shift-to-MBCS and shift-to-one-byte are necessary
for a string translation operation.
•
If any of the optional formal parameters are omitted, the procedure returns, in
maximum-length, the maximum possible length in bytes for the destination data
buffer. In general, translations to external text formats yield text strings of
increased length. The maximum possible finished length for the specified
conditions will be returned. If less than this amount of space is allowed, the
translation procedure might fail due to insufficient space in the destination string.
•
Any invalid 2-byte character that is found in the source string is mapped to the
value %HFCFC. Any nondisplayable 2-byte character that is found in the source
string is mapped to the value %HFCFB.
•
The definition of nondisplayable and illegal characters varies with the target
mapping format. The IBM and Fujitsu character sets contain extensions that are
not supported in the HP internal character set. When extension character codes
are encountered, they are mapped to the nondisplayable character code for the HP
character set.
The most common definition of an illegal character code is a character pair that is
expected to be a 2-byte code but has an invalid first or second byte.
Any character mapped to either a nondisplayable or illegal character target code
becomes nonrecoverable for conversion to the original format.