MBCS Inquiry Routines

The MBCS inquiry routines provide information on the maximum length of multibyte characters, the length, number and position of multibyte characters in strings, and whether a multibyte character is a leading or trailing byte. These routines are summarized in the following table. The NLS library provides a parameter, MBLenMax, defined in the NLS module to be the longest length (in bytes) of any character, in any codepage. This parameter can be useful in comparisons and tests. To determine the maximum character length of the current codepage, use the MBCurMax function.

MBCS Inquiry Routines

Name	Procedure Type	Description
MBCharLen	Function	Returns the length of the first multibyte character in a string
MBCurMax	Function	Returns the longest possible multibyte character for the current codepage
MBLead	Function	Determines whether a given character is the first byte of a multibyte character
MBLen	Function	Returns the number of multibyte characters in a string, including trailing spaces
MBLen_Trim	Function	Returns the number of multibyte characters in a string, not including trailing spaces
MBNext	Function	Returns the string position of the first byte of the multibyte character immediately after the given string position
MBPrev	Function	Returns the string position of the first byte of the multibyte character immediately before the given string position
MBStrLead	Function	Performs a context sensitive test to determine whether a given byte in a character string is a lead byte

As an example:

    USE DFNLS
    CHARACTER(4) str
    INTEGER status
    status = NLSSetLocale ("Japan")
    str = " ·, " ¿"
    PRINT '(1X,''String by char = '',\)'
    DO i = 1, len(str)
       PRINT '(A2,\)',str(i:i)
    END DO
    PRINT '(/,1X,''MBLead = '',\)'
    DO i = 1, len(str)
       PRINT '(L2,\)',mblead(str(i:i))
    END DO
    PRINT '(/,1X,''String as whole = '',A,\)',str
    PRINT '(/,1X,''MBStrLead = '',\)'
    DO i = 1, len(str)
       PRINT '(L1,\)',MBStrLead(str,i)
    END DO
    END

This code produces the following output for str = · , " ¿