The Cleaning Service provides access to the SSA-NAME3 Cleaning routine. There is one Cleaning routine for single-byte data (called N3CN), and another for double-byte data (called N3CNDB). It is also possible to invoke a user-written Cleaning routine via this Service.

The main objective of the SSA-NAME3 Cleaning routines is to examine a name character for character, and to either leave the character unchanged, or to transform it according to a Character Set rule (example, lower case to upper case). There are different Character Set tables for different languages or code-pages.

The Cleaning routines can also perform string transformations according to special Edit-list rules.

The Cleaning Service is always invoked internally by the NAMESET & MATCH Services as part of the preparation for key building and matching. The Cleaning Service could be called directly by an Application if the requirement was to clean a name before that name was used for some other, nonkeying, purpose, for example, to remove any non-alphanumeric characters before storing the name or printing mailing labels.