You probably mean EBCDIC, which is an encoding, not COBOL, which is a language. You can use EBCDIC-to-ASCII converters (most often in mainframe file transfer programs). After that, you have a plain, fixed-width, ascii file to work with. It's usually a lot simpler than trying to do the EBCDIC conversion yourself.

As an aside, there are COBOL fields that are a pain to parse (COMP fields, specifically), but if you have plain X and 9 fields, you're OK.

Update
For example, once you have it in ascii, you can handle your first record with something as simple as:

($ccnum_out, $ccdesc_out, $cl_out, $cldesc_out) =
    unpack('A14 A40 A14 A38', $class_out);

[download]
Assuming $class_out contains the whole line. For more details on unpack, take a look at perlfunc:pack.

Do not rebuke them with harsh words ... but rather lead them gently - with URLs - so that they may learn wisdom.

In reply to Re: COBOL to ascii conversions by VSarkiss
in thread COBOL to ascii conversions by sweetblood

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