I am reading a COBOL program file and I am struggling to understand the way the STRING command works in the following example
STRING WK-NO-EMP-SGE
','
WK-DT-DEB-PER-FEU-TEM
','
WK-DT-FIN-PER-FEU-TEM
DELIMITED BY SIZE
INTO UUUUUU-CO-CLE-ERR-DB2
I have three possible understandings of what it does:
Either the code concatenate each variables into UUUUUU-CO-CLE-ERR-DB2 and separate each values with ',', and the last variable is delimited by size;
Either the code concatenate each variables into UUUUUU-CO-CLE-ERR-DB2 and separate each values with ',', but all the values are delimited by size (meaning that the DELIMITED BY SIZE in this case applies to all the values passed in the string command;
Or each variable is delimited by a specific character, for example WK-NO-EMP-SGE would be delimited by ',', WK-DT-DEB-PER-FEU-TEM by ',' and WK-DT-FIN-PER-FEU-TEM would then be DELIMITED BY SIZE.
Which of my reading is actually the good one?
Here's the syntax-diagram for STRING (from the Enterprise COBOL Language Reference):
Now you need to know how to read it.
Fortunately, the same document tells you how:
How to read the syntax diagrams
Use the following description to read the syntax diagrams in this
document:
. Read the syntax diagrams from left to right, from top to bottom,
following the path of the line.
The >>--- symbol indicates the beginning of a syntax diagram.
The ---> symbol indicates that the syntax diagram is continued on the
next line.
The >--- symbol indicates that the syntax diagram is continued from
the previous line.
The --->< symbol indicates the end of a syntax diagram. Diagrams of
syntactical units other than complete statements start with the >---
symbol and end with the ---> symbol.
. Required items appear on the horizontal line (the main path).
. Optional items appear below the main path.
. When you can choose from two or more items, they appear vertically,
in a stack.
If you must choose one of the items, one item of the stack appears on
the main path.
If choosing one of the items is optional, the entire stack appears
below the main path.
. An arrow returning to the left above the main line indicates an item
that can be repeated.
A repeat arrow above a stack indicates that you can make more than one
choice from the stacked items, or repeat a single choice.
. Variables appear in italic lowercase letters (for example, parmx).
They represent user-supplied names or values.
. If punctuation marks, parentheses, arithmetic operators, or other
such symbols are shown, they must be entered as part of the syntax.
All that means, if you follow it through, that your number 2 is correct.
You can use a delimiter (when you don't have fixed-length data) or just use the size. Any item which is not explicit in how it is delimited, is delimited by the next DELIMITED BY statement.
One thing to watch for with STRING, which doesn't matter in your case, is that the target field does not get space-padded if the data is shorter than the target. With variable-length data, you need to clear the field to space before the STRING executes.
There is a nuance one must grasp in order to understand the results. DELIMITED BY SIZE can be misleading if one has experience in other programming languages.
Each of the three variables has a size that is defined in WORKING-STORAGE. Let's presume it looks something like this.
05 WK-NO-EMP-SGE PIC X(04).
05 WK-DT-DEB-PER-FEU-TEM PIC X(10).
05 WK-DT-FIN-PER-FEU-TEM PIC X(10).
If the value of the variables were set like this:
MOVE 'BOB' TO WK-NO-EMP-SGE.
MOVE 'Q' TO WK-DT-DEB-PER-FEU-TEM.
MOVE 'D19EIEIO2B' TO WK-DT-FIN-PER-FEU-TEM.
Then one might expect the value of UUUUUU-CO-CLE-ERR-DB2 to be:
BOB,Q,D19EIEIO2B
But it would actually be:
BOB ,Q ,D19EIEIO2B
Related
I am tryng to get rid of shortcodes inside a Google Sheet column. I have many items such as [spacer type="1" height="20"][spacer] or [FinalTilesGallery id="37"] I just would like to cancel them. Is there any simple way to do it?
Thanks !
For in-place replacement, the quick option would be to use the Find and Replace dialog (Ctrl + H) with Search Using Regular Expressions turned on, which is more powerful than your standard Find and Replace.
Find: \[.*?\] - Match anything within an open-bracket up to the very next close-bracket. This should work assuming you have no nested brackets, e.g. [[no][no]].
If you do have nested brackets, you'll have to change this to \[[^\[\]]*\]. And continue to Replace All until all the codes are gone.
Replace: Nothing.
Replace All. If you don't want to affect other sheets that may be in your document, make sure you select the right range to work with, too.
This just erases everything within the brackets.
If you want to erase any redundant spaces left by this, simply Find and Replace again (with Regular Expressions) on + (space and plus), which will match 1 or more spaces and replace with (single space).
E.g.:
string [] [] string2 -> string string2 after the shortcode replacement.
After replacing spaces, it will become string string2.
Let's say your original strings are in the range A2:A. Place the following into B2 of an otherwise completely empty Column B (or the second cell of any other empty column):
=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="",,TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(A2:A,"\[[^\[\]]+\]",""))))
I can't see your data, so I don't know what kind of information is between these shortcodes. If you find that this leaves you with concatenated pieces of data where there should be spaces between them, replace the above with this version:
=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="",,TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2:A,"["," ["),"]","] "),"\[[^\[\]]+\]",""))))
I can't teach regular expression language here. But I will note that, since square brackets have specific meaning within regex, your literal square brackets must be indicated with the escape character: the backslash.
Here is the regex expression alone:
\[[^\[\]]+\]
The opening \[ and the closing \], then, reference your actual opening and closing bracket sets. If we remove those, we have this left:
[^\[\]]+
Again, you see the escaped opening and closing square brackets, which I'll replace with the word these:
[^these]+
What remains there are opening and closing brackets with regex meaning, i.e., "anything in this group." And the circumflex symbol ^ as the first character within this set of square brackets means "anything except." The + symbol means "in any string length of one or more characters."
So that whole regex expression then reads: "A literal open square bracket, followed by one or more characters that are anything except square brackets, ending with a literal closing square bracket."
And we are REGEXREPLACE-ing any instance of that with "" (i.e., nothing).
Hello guys I want to convert my non delimited file into a delimited file
Example of the file is as follows.
Name. CIF Address line 1 State Phn Address line 2 Country Billing Address line 3
Alex. 44A. Biston NJ 25478163 4th,floor XY USA 55/2018 kenning
And so on all the data are in this format.
First three lines are metadata and then the data.
How can I make it delimited in proper format using logic.
There are two parts in the problem:
how to find the column widths
how to split each line into fields and output a new line with delimiters
I could not propose an automated solution for the first one, because (not knowing anything about the metadata format), there is no clear way to find where one column ends and the next one begins. Some of the column headings contain multiple space-separated words and space is also used as a separator between the headings (and apparently one cannot use the rule "more than one space means the end of a heading name" because there's only one space between "Address line 2" and "Country" - and they're clearly separate columns. Clearly, finding the correct column widths requires understanding English and this is not something that you can write a program for.
For the second problem, things are much easier - once you have the column positions. If you figure the column positions manually (or programmatically, if you know something about the metadata that I don't - and you have a simple method for finding what's a column heading), then a program written in AWK can do this, for example:
cols="8,15,32,40,53,66,83,105"
awk_prog='BEGIN {
nt=split(cols,tabs,",")
delim=","
ORS=""
}
{ o=1 ;
for (i in tabs) { t=tabs[i] ; f=substr($0,o,t-o); sub(" *$","",f) ; print f
delim ; o=t } ;
print substr($0, o) "\n"
}'
awk -v cols="$cols" "$awk_prog" input_file
NOTE that the above program does not deal correctly with the case when the separator character (e.g. ",") appears inside the data. If you decide to use this as-is, be sure to use a separator that is not present in the input data. It may be better to modify the code to escape any separator characters found in the input data (there are different ways to do this - depends on what you plan to feed the output file to).
I want to make three fields into one field with only a single space between each word in Cobol. I this the correct format below
STRING SORT-WORKER-LAST SPACE
SORT-WORKER-FIRST SPACE
SORT-WORKER-MID SPACE
DELIMITED BY SIZE
INTO REC-VSAM-NAME
This didn't work:
STRING SORT-WORKER-LAST SPACE
SORT-WORKER-FIRST SPACE
SORT-WORKER-MID SPACE
DELIMITED BY space
INTO REC-VSAM-NAME
STRING SORT-WORKER-LAST
SORT-WORKER-FIRST
SORT-WORKER-MID
DELIMITED BY space
INTO REC-VSAM-NAME
Not working either.
SS5726 test test t
" " DELIMETED BY SPACE
This above code is not giving me what I am looking for either.
When used in a STRING statement, the figurative constant SPACE (or SPACES, they are equivalent, the plural means nothing except for human reading) has a length of one byte.
You may not be finished with this. If your source fields contain embedded spaces, you will be best to abandon STRING and do something else.
If you proceed with STRING or there is another time you want to consider using it, then you also have to think about the length of your output field. If you don't do anything about it, it will be quietly truncated.
I've included an example of how to do something. Note that the STRING now has a conditional element (ON), so you must delimit the scope of the STRING by END-STRING (also possible, but tacky, with full-stop/period).
If, logically, the output cannot be breached, the ON OVERFLOW is not needed. Also, if what you are told to do is "just truncate" then it can be omitted, although I'd tend to at least count them, and display the count at the end of the program. Then when the Analyst has said, "there won't be any, just truncate if there are" you can go back and say that there were 3,931 when you did your volume test.
As ScottNelson has pointed out in a comment, there are a couple of things to watch out for with STRING. What concerns you here is that only the data selected by the STRING will appear in your output field, your output field will not be space-padded, as it would be after a MOVE statement.
Because you have been using fixed-length fields up to now, you won't have noticed this. Once you have the correction, you may find, if you are not setting the output field to SPACE first, that you have a mixture of values, with some left over from the previous content.
Another one with STRING is the POINTER.
The effects of the way STRING works is useful if that is what you want. You just have to know what to do to avoid those things when you don't want that action.
Every time you find something new in COBOL, hit that manual. Language Reference first. Try to understand. Programming Guide. Try further. If unsure, experiment. Read manual. Experiment. Continue until understood.
Each time I read the manual, I try to look at something else as well. One technique with knowing a language is to know the type of thing that can be done, and to know where to find the detail, and how to understand the explanations.
You will find similar things with all the "complex" COBOL verbs, STRING, UNSTRING, INSPECT. They have actions which seem initially to be working against you, but which are useful, and otherwise not available, when you need them.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. DOUGH.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 PART-1 PIC X(30) VALUE "TEST".
01 PART-2 PIC X(30) VALUE "TEST".
01 PART-3 PIC X(30) VALUE "T".
01 ALL-PARTS PIC X(30).
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
MOVE SPACE TO ALL-PARTS
* MOVE ZERO TO data-name-used-with-POINTER
* (if used)
STRING PART-1 DELIMITED BY SPACE
SPACE DELIMITED BY SIZE
PART-2 DELIMITED BY SPACE
SPACE DELIMITED BY SIZE
PART-3 DELIMITED BY SPACE
INTO ALL-PARTS
ON OVERFLOW
DISPLAY "SORRY, YOUR DATA WAS TRUNCATED"
END-STRING
DISPLAY
">"
ALL-PARTS
"<"
GOBACK
.
Try....
STRING SORT-WORKER-LAST DELIMITED BY SPACE
" " DELIMITED BY SIZE
SORT-WORKER-FIRST DELIMITED BY SPACE
" " DELIMITED BY SIZE
SORT-WORKER-MID DELIMITED BY SPACE
INTO REC-VSAM-NAME
Try
STRING
field-1 DELIMITED BY SIZE
" " DELIMITED BY SIZE
field-2 DELIMITED BY SIZE
INTO big-field
Just for completeness sake, you can do the following if you want to be able to cope with data fields that have embedded spaces (in other words, text fields containing multiple words):
INSPECT SORT-WORKER-FIRST
REPLACING TRAILING SPACES BY LOW-VALUES.
INSPECT SORT-WORKER-MID
REPLACING TRAILING SPACES BY LOW-VALUES.
INSPECT SORT-WORKER-LAST
REPLACING TRAILING SPACES BY LOW-VALUES.
STRING SORT-WORKER-LAST " " SORT-WORKER-FIRST " " SORT-WORKER-MID
DELIMITED BY LOW-VALUE INTO REC-VSAM-NAME.
For instance, this would cope when SORT-WORKER-LAST contained something like "VAN DYKE".
If you didn't want to modify the existing SORT-WORKER-* fields, you'd have to move each to a separate field and INSPECT and then STRING those fields.
What you are doing here is converting each of the strings to the 'C' equivalent - terminated by a NUL.
Of course, this depends if your Cobol is new enough.
I'm running some tests on Cobol pictures and wondering if --- is a valid picture. Am I right in saying that this picture accepts values in the range of -99 through to +99. If it is valid then it is possible for the picture to accept 3 spaces as a value?
For example:
12 would return 12
1 would return 1
Cheers
Yes --- is a valid PICTURE clause. The variable corresponding to this PICTURE will accept assignments of numeric values in the range -99 through to +99. It cannot be assigned non-numerics (space for example). However, if you were to DISPLAY this variable after assigning a numeric value to it, leading zeros will be replaced by spaces. Consequently, if you MOVE ZERO to this item it will DISPLAY only spaces. Attempting to MOVE SPACES to this item will result in a compile error (incompatible data types). This last bit may seem a little counter intutive, but remember that this type of PICTURE clause implies a USAGE of display - basically items defined in this manner are used to 'pretty print' numbers. About the only operations you can preform with USAGE DISPLAY items is MOVE to or from and DISPLAY them.
EDIT - Response to Comment
A PICTURE of ---X(2) is invalid. The chart below illustrates combinations and the order that symbols may appear in a PICTURE string. Notice that parenthesis are not in the chart. Logically you can replace them with the corresponding number of occurences of the preceding character before reading the string. For example X(3) is read as XXX. If you really want to parse out a PICTURE string properly, you can use this chart to construct a BNF grammar specifically for them.
If this is a numeric picture, it won't accept spaces.
I have some csv record which are variable in length , for example:
0005464560,45667759,ZAMTR,!To ACC 12345678,DR,79.85
0006786565,34567899,ZAMTR,!To ACC 26575443,DR,1000
I need to seperate each of these fields and I need the last field which should be a money.
However, as I read the file, and unstring the record into fields, I found that the last field contain junk value at the end of itself. The amount(money) field should be 8 characters, 5 digit at the front, 1 dot, 2 digit at the end. The values from the input could be any value such as 13.5, 1000 and 354.23 .
"FILE SECTION"
FD INPUT_FILE.
01 INPUT_REC PIC X(66).
"WORKING STORAGE SECTion"
01 WS_INPUT_REC PIC X(66).
01 WS_AMOUNT_NUM PIC 9(5).9(2).
01 WS_AMOUNT_TXT PIC X(8).
"MAIN SECTION"
UNSTRING INPUT_REC DELIMITED BY ","
INTO WS_ID_1, WS_ID_2, WS_CODE, WS_DESCRIPTION, WS_FLAG, WS_AMOUNT_TXT
MOVE WS_AMOUNT_TXT(1:8) TO WS_AMOUNT_NUM(1:8)
DISPLAY WS_AMOUNT_NUM
From the display, the value is rather normal: 345.23, 1000, just as what are, however, after I wrote the field into a file, here is what they become:
79.85^M^#^#
137.35^M^#
I have inspect the field WS_AMOUNT_NUM, which came from the field WS_AMOUNT_TXT, and found that ^# is a kind of LOW-VALUE. However, I cannot find what is ^M, it is not a space, not a high-value.
I am guessing, but it looks like you may be reading variable length records from a file into a fixed length
COBOL record. The junk
at the end of the COBOL record is giving you some grief. Hard to say how consistent that junk is going
to be from one read to the next (data beyond the bounds of actual input record length are technically
undefined). That junk ends up
being included in WS_AMOUNT_TXT after the UNSTRING
There are a number of ways to solve this problem. The suggestion I am giving you here may not
be optimal, but it is simple and should get the job done.
The last INTO field, WS_AMOUNT_TXT, in your UNSTRING statement is the one that receives all of the trailing
junk. That junk needs to be stripped off. Knowing that the only valid characters in the last field are
digits and the decimal character, you could clean it up as follows:
PERFORM VARYING WS_I FROM LENGTH OF WS_AMOUNT_TXT BY -1
UNTIL WS_I = ZERO
IF WS_AMOUNT_TXT(WS_I:1) IS NUMERIC OR
WS_AMOUNT_TXT(WS_I:1) = '.'
MOVE ZERO TO WS_I
ELSE
MOVE SPACE TO WS_AMOUNT_TXT(WS_I:1)
END-IF
END-PERFORM
The basic idea in the above code is to scan from the end of the last UNSTRING output field
to the beginning replacing anything that is not a valid digit or decimal point with a space.
Once a valid digit/decimal is found, exit the loop on the assumption that the rest will
be valid.
After cleanup use the intrinsic function NUMVAL as outlined in my answer to your
previous question
to convert WS_AMOUNT_TXT into a numeric data type.
One final piece of advice, MOVE SPACES TO INPUT_REC before each READ to blow away data left over
from a previous read that might be left in the buffer. This will protect you when reading a very "short"
record after a "long" one - otherwise you may trip over data left over from the previous read.
Hope this helps.
EDIT Just noticed this answer to your question about reading variable length files. Using a variable length input record is a better approach. Given the
actual input record length you can do something like:
UNSTRING INPUT_REC(1:REC_LEN) INTO...
Where REC_LEN is the variable specified after OCCURS DEPENDING ON for the INPUT_REC file FD. All the junk you are encountering occurs after the end of the record as defined by REC_LEN. Using reference modification as illustrated above trims it off before UNSTRING does its work to separate out the individual data fields.
EDIT 2:
Cannot use reference modification with UNSTRING. Darn... It is possible with some other COBOL dialects but not with OpenVMS COBOL. Try the following:
MOVE INPUT_REC(1:REC_LEN) TO WS_BUFFER
UNSTRING WS_BUFFER INTO...
Where WS_BUFFER is a working storage PIC X variable long enough to hold the longest input record. When you MOVE a short alpha-numeric field to a longer one, the destination field is left justified with spaces used to pad remaining space (ie. WS_BUFFER). Since leading and trailing spaces are acceptable to the NUMVAL fucnction you have exactly what you need.
I have a reason for pushing you in this direction. Any junk that ends up at the trailing end of a record buffer when reading a short record is undefined. There is a possibility that some of that junk just might end up being a digit or a decimal point. Should this occur, the cleanup routine I originally suggested would fail.
EDIT 3:
There are no ^# in the resulting WS_AMOUNT_TXT, but still there are a ^M
Looks like the file system is treating <CR> (that ^M thing) at the end of each record as data.
If the file you are reading came from a Windows platform and you are now
reading it on a UNIX platform that would explain the problem. Under Windows records
are terminated with <CR><LF> while on UNIX they are terminated with <LF> only. The
UNIX file system treats <CR> as if it were part of the record.
If this is the case, you can be pretty sure that there will be a single <CR> at the
end of every record read. There are a number of ways to deal with this:
Method 1: As you already noted, pre-edit the file using Notepad++ or some other
tool to remove the <CR> characters before processing through your COBOL program.
Personally I don't think this is the best way of going about it. I prefer to use a COBOL
only solution since it involves fewer processing steps.
Method 2: Trim the last character from each input record before processing it. The last
character should always be <CR>. Try the following if you
are reading records as variable length and have the actual input record length available.
SUBTRACT 1 FROM REC_LEN
MOVE INPUT_REC(1:REC_LEN) TO WS_BUFFER
UNSTRING WS_BUFFER INTO...
Method 3: Treat <CR> as a delimiter when UNSTRINGing as follows:
UNSTRING INPUT_REC DELIMITED BY "," OR x"0D"
INTO WS_ID_1, WS_ID_2, WS_CODE, WS_DESCRIPTION, WS_FLAG, WS_AMOUNT_TXT
Method 4: Condition the last receiving field from UNSTRING by replacing trailing
non digit/non decimal point characters with spaces. I outlined this solution a litte earlier in this
question. You could also explore the INSPECT statement using the REPLACING option (Format 2). This should be able to do pretty much the same thing - just replace all x"00" by SPACE and x"0D" by SPACE.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Any of the above solutions should work for you. Choose the one you are most comfortable with.
^M is a carriage return.
Would Google Refine be useful for rectifying this data?