The symbols, along with character sets with which they are used, are defined in the following table.
| Symbol | Encoding | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| a–z A–Z 0–9 |
Any | Any single byte Latin letter or digit. |
| a–z A–Z 0–9 |
Any | Any fullwidth Latin letter or digit. |
| < | KanjiEBCDIC | Shift Out [SO] (0x0E). Indicates transition from single to multibyte character in KanjiEBCDIC. |
| > | KanjiEBCDIC | Shift In [SI] (0x0F). Indicates transition from multibyte to single byte KanjiEBCDIC. |
| T | Any | Any multibyte character. The encoding depends on the current character set. For KanjiEUC, code set 3 characters are always preceded by “ss 3”. |
| I | Any | Any single byte Hankaku Katakana character. In KanjiEUC, it must be preceded by “ss 2”, forming an individual multibyte character. |
| Δ | Any | Represents the graphic pad character. |
| Δ | Any | Represents a single or multibyte pad character, depending on context. |
| ss 2 | KanjiEUC | Represents the EUC code set 2 introducer (0x8E). |
| ss 3 | KanjiEUC | Represents the EUC code set 3 introducer (0x8F). |
For example, string “TEST”, where each letter is intended to be a fullwidth character, is written as TEST. Occasionally, when encoding is important, hexadecimal representation is used.
For example, the following mixed single byte/multibyte character data in KanjiEBCDIC character set
LMN<TEST>QRS
is represented as:
D3 D4 D5 0E 42E3 42C5 42E2 42E3 0F D8 D9 E2