CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stringsubstringcobol
mike
mike

Reputation: 13

Cobol substrings; taking a 4 character string and taking the inside 2 characters

I have been stuck on this issue for a while now. Help would be much appreciated.

I have a 4 digit number read in from a file and I need to take the inside 2 digits. I thought that reading the number in as a string would be a good idea, then take the the middle two digits in a substring and use the numval function to convert them back. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to obtain the inside two characters.

Ex. I have the number 5465, I want to get 46.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 14575

Answers (4)

cschneid
cschneid

Reputation: 10765

What Keith Thompson proposes will work fine. You might want to check that I > 0 and J > 0. That wouldn't be a problem if you know 1000 <= I <= 9999 always.

IBM Enterprise COBOL includes a MOD function, which may or may not be available with your compiler.

I think you could also do the following...

01  A-GROUP.
    05  A-NUMBER PIC 9999 VALUE ZEROES.
    05  A-STRING REDEFINES A-NUMBER.
        10  FILLER PIC X.
        10  THE-MIDDLE-TWO-DIGITS PIC XX.
        10  FILLER PIC X.

MOVE your-number TO A-NUMBER.

This should work whether your-number is defined as COMP or COMP-3, provided 0 <= your-number <= 9999.

Upvotes: 5

Bill Woodger
Bill Woodger

Reputation: 13076

01  a-long-piece-of-data.
    05  the-first-character pic x.
    05  the-two-characters-we-want pic xx.
    05  the-last-character pic x.

01  a-short-piece-of-data pic xx.
01  filler redefines a-short-piece-of-data.
    05  a-short-unsigned-number pic 99.

MOVE the-two-characters-we-want TO a-short-piece-of-data
MOVE/ADD/COMPUTE/whatever a-short-unsigned-number

or MOVE a-short-piece-of-data TO wherever

Have a signed number and want to retain the sign?

01  a-long-number PIC S9(4).
01  FILLER REDEFINES a-long-number.
    05  FILLER PIC X.
    05  an-integer-with-one-decimal-place PIC S99V9.

01  a-short-number-no-decimals PIC S99.

MOVE an-integer-with-one-decimal-place TO a-short-number-no-decimals

Upvotes: 0

Joe Zitzelberger
Joe Zitzelberger

Reputation: 4263

You can use reference modification. Consider the following:

1 WS-MY-FIELD Pic X(4).
1 WS-TGT-FIELD Pic X(2).
...
Move WS-MY-FIELD (2:2) to WS-TGT-FIELD

The first number indicates the start position (1 based) and the second number indicates the length.

Upvotes: 5

Keith Thompson
Keith Thompson

Reputation: 263307

If you have it as a number rather than as a string, you can do it arithmetically. Given that I is 5465, and you want to store 46 in J:

DIVIDE I BY 10 GIVING J.
DIVIDE J BY 100 GIVING ignored REMAINDER J.

Upvotes: 3

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