Character Shorthand Notation Used in This Document | Teradata Database - Character Shorthand Notation Used in This Document - Teradata Database

SQL Data Definition Language Syntax and Examples
Deployment
VantageCloud
VantageCore
Edition
VMware
Enterprise
IntelliFlex
Product
Teradata Database
Release Number
20.00
Publication Date
June 2025
Content Type
SQL Reference
Publication ID
B035-1144-200K
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en-US
ft:lastEdition
2026-09-23
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This document uses the Unicode naming convention for characters. For example, the lowercase character ‘a’ is more formally specified as either LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A or U+0041. The U+xxxx notation refers to a particular code point in the Unicode standard, where xxxx stands for the hexadecimal representation of the 16-bit value defined in the standard.

This document may use a symbol to represent a special character, or a particular class of characters, especially when discussing the following Japanese character encodings:
  • KanjiEBCDIC
  • KanjiEUC
  • KanjiShift-JIS

These encodings are further defined in International Character Set Support, B035-1125.

Character Symbols

The following table defines the symbols and their associated character sets.
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 ss3.
I Any Any single byte Hankaku Katakana character.

In KanjiEUC, it must be preceded by ss2, 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. 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

Pad Characters

The following table lists the pad characters for the character data types.
Server Character Set Pad Character Name Pad Character Value
LATIN SPACE 0x20
UNICODE SPACE U+0020
GRAPHIC IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE U+3000
KANJISJIS ASCII SPACE 0x20
KANJI1 ASCII SPACE 0x20