In a multibyte character environment, the text of operator messages produced by TDP contains only valid EBCDIC graphic characters (in the range of X’40’ through X’EF’).
Other characters are replaced by a hyphen before the message is issued. The only exceptions are the control characters Shift-out and Shift-in, which are replaced by the less than (<) and greater than (>) characters, respectively.
When more than one byte comprises a character, each byte is replaced by a hyphen. So the number of hyphens reflects the number of bytes, not the number of characters.