We call those built-in functions. To remove quotes at start and end, it's DEQUOTE.
To un-double embedded quotes and ampersands, use DCVAL. To double them back again, say for an MNOTE insert, use DOUBLE. The character built-in functions cannot be nested, so to apply more than one to the same text you need more than one SETC. If you want to use character built-in functions and string concatenation in the same character expression you may need the fix for APAR PH57717 (very recent) to get correct results. It also improves the diagnostics for the unsupported nested function case: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/PH57717 Jonathan Scott, HLASM IBM Hursley, UK
