Naming within commands

You can use only specific characters for naming within commands.

The type of name you specify in control language determines the characters you can use to specify a name. For certain types of names, there are restrictions on the use of certain characters to represent the name. Those types of names are *NAME, *SNAME, and *CNAME.

Note: For a description of how to specify these names when you use command definitions to create commands, see the PARM (parameter) and ELEM (element) statements.

The characters allowed for the *NAME, *SNAME, and *CNAME names and the rules you use to specify them are shown in the table below.

Table 1. Allowable Characters for *NAME, *SNAME, and *CNAME
Type of Name	First Character	Other Characters	Min. Length	Max. Length
*NAME ¹	A-Z, $, #, @	A-Z, 0-9, $, #, @, _, .	1	256
*SNAME ¹	A-Z, $, #, @	A-Z, 0-9, $, #, @, _	1	256
*CNAME ¹	A-Z, $, #, @	A-Z, 0-9, $, #, @
Quoted name ²	"3	Any except blank, *, ?, ', ", X'00'-X'3F', and X'FF'	3	256
Note: The system converts lowercase letters to uppercase letters. Double quotes can only be used for basic names (*NAME). Both the first and last characters must be a double quote (").