This is more just a question that emerged from the inky depths of my mind. The COBOL compiler we have, 3.4.1, has an XML PARSE verb. I looked in the current, 6.1, COBOL language reference material and notice that there is now a JSON PARSE verb. Excellent work, COBOL people! But there are a lot of products (Excel being a heavily used one) which doesn't export to JSON or XML, but will to a "comma separated" file (although a separator other than a comma may be used as well - we us the "pipe" symbol). In our migration off of z/OS we use this latter format for importing and exporting data to our outside vendor. Also, UNIX likes "delimited files"; often using a tab or a colon as a separator. So, I was wondering if anyone else uses this type of file for transport purposes? How do you handle it in COBOL? We are basically "parsing" this type of data using an UNSTRING ... DELIMITED BY .... We are creating it using a STRING verb. I'm guessing this is both the easiest and most efficient. But I'm just curious about the rest of the world.
-- Heisenberg may have been here. Unicode: http://xkcd.com/1726/ Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
