SQL Reference

Characters

The basic symbols of keywords and operators in the SQL language are single-byte characters that are part of all IBM character sets. Characters of the language are classified as letters, digits, or special characters.

A letter is any of the 26 uppercase (A through Z) and 26 lowercase (a through z) letters plus the three characters ($, #, and @), which are included for compatibility with host database products (for example, in code page 850, $ is at X'24' # is at X'23', and @ is at X'40'). Letters also include the alphabetics from the extended character sets. Extended character sets contain additional alphabetic characters; for example, those with diacritical marks (´ is an example of a diacritical mark). The available characters depend on the code page in use.

A digit is any of the characters 0 through 9.

A special character is any of the characters listed below:
  blank - minus sign
" quotation mark or double-quote . period
% percent / slash
& ampersand : colon
' apostrophe or single quote ; semicolon
( left parenthesis < less than
) right parenthesis = equals
* asterisk > greater than
+ plus sign ? question mark
, comma _ underline or underscore
| vertical bar ^ caret
! exclamation mark

MBCS Considerations

All multi-byte characters are treated as letters, except for the double-byte blank which is a special character.


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