Cobol REPLACING ALL pattern matching
<p>I'm working on converting some legacy COBOL code and came across a statement like this:</p>

<pre><code>INSPECT WS-LOCAL-VAR REPLACING ALL X'0D25' BY ' '
</code></pre>

<p>I understand that the INSPECT...REPLACING ALL statement will look through WS-LOCAL-VAR, match the pattern X'0D25' and replace it with a space.</p>

<p>What I don't understand is the purpose of the X outside of '0D25'. All examples of REPLACING ALL that I've found online don't use anything other than a char literal for pattern matching.</p>

<p>How does the X affect which patterns are replaced? </p>

<p>COBOL is running on an EBCDIC machine and the input file is coming from a Windows machine.</p>