Using UTF-8 data (Unicode) in COBOL

UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode encoding that encodes each valid Unicode code point using one to four 8-bit bytes. UTF-8 has many desirable properties, including that it is backwards compatible with ASCII, often provides a more compact representation of Unicode data than UTF-16, and is endianness independent.UTF-8 is the preferred encoding of HTML and related languages and it is by far the most common encoding of data on the World Wide Web.

For details about the UTF-8 support in Enterprise COBOL, see the related references.