Hmm.

I guess I'd start the discussion by showing a COBOL layout, and then pointing to the pieces that would need to be dealt with.

We'd need an object that took the layout as a create arg. It would parse out all the fields, setting up a array of field objects. Each field object would have enough info to read/understand that field type.

I'd have a higher level structure that would take into account the physical read/unpack of the data, which would then be mapped back to the individual fields.

In the case of 'redefines', I'd need a higher level parent object, then children that refer back to it, into pieces of it. We can't just chunk out the data since either object modifying it should be modifying the same data.

In the case of 'occurs', we'd need arrays of objects.

If the data has no 'comp' fields, I can do an EBCDIC to ASCII conversion of front to the entire record. If not, we've got to deal with it against ranges of bytes split by comp fields.

In reply to Modules? by broomberg
in thread COBOL Layout parsing by broomberg

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