A DBCS file is a file that contains double-byte data or is used to process double-byte data. Other files are called alphanumeric files. You can view DBCS files on display, printer, tape, diskette, and ICF devices.
You use data description specifications (DDS) to describe DBCS-capable device files. For information about using DDS, see the DDS concepts topic.
You should indicate that a file is DBCS in one or more of the following situations:
Typically, both single-byte characters and double-byte characters are used in a DBCS environment. For example, an accounting firm in Japan uses both English and Japanese for the spreadsheet. If both English and Japanese are being encoded as mixed SBCS and DBCS, the product must be able to understand a mixed character set that contains both single-byte coded characters and double-byte coded characters.
In IBM® systems that use EBCDIC, a DBCS string is bracketed in a mixed data stream by a shift-out (SO) control character and a shift-in (SI) control character.
The following example shows the coding for a mixed string:
sss (SO) D1D2D (SI) ssss
The following example shows the coding for a mixed hexadecimal string:
818283 0E 41424143 0F 818283
i5/OS™ supports Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese character-set code ranges.
Using the iSeries™ Access family of products, the servers also provide support for these non-IBM personal computer DBCS code pages: