OpenEuphoria

Re: Euphoria and fixed field record formats .....

• Posted by Jonas Temple <jtemple at yhti.net> Nov 20, 2004
• 511 views

John Dutcher wrote:
> 
> I am new but have used Euphoria very happily and 
> effectively for several projects and really like it.
> 
> I am interested in how those who have a depth of knowledge do code to
> handle fixed format data records usually viewed as structures as in
> Cobol, Basic etc. I processed  them in a CGI app using Euphoria by
> just "slicing" every field from the record level "sequence"...but had
> the luxury that all data was "text" or character.
> 
> But consider a tiny sample Cobol created record: 
>                                        01  AAA.
>         character      --->              03  BBB  pic x(12).  
>         packed decimal --->              03  CCC  pic s9(5)  comp-3.
>         zoned decimal  --->              03  DDD  pic s999   display.
>         signed binary  --->              03  EEE  pic s999   comp.
> 
> This representative sequence often repeats in some pattern many times
> per record.
> 
> What is the "right" way to address these values after one has read 
> them into a sequence or object that is the result the I/O operation ?
> 
Are the records in a database (i.e. Mainframe) or on the local PC?  If
it's on a mainframe are they flat files or do they have external 
descriptions?  

If the data is on the PC then you'll just have to substring the sequence
to get the data.  The trick is going to be converting the packed decimal
into a Euphoria atom.  I think there is an EBCDIC translation library
somewhere in the archives that might help with the text stuff.

I work on the AS/400 so I use Client Access to get to the database and
CA has functions to convert from packed to a float.


Jonas Temple
http://www.yhti.net/~jktemple