COBOL Inspect field to remove special characters

newbie · New User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 12

Is there a way to inspect a field for special characters and remove them:

examples:

from to
A45678-12 A4567812
AB* C42-A ABC42A

Thank you.

newbie · New User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 12

Oops, I meant:

from:

A45678-12

to:

A4567812

or

from:

AB* C42-A

to:

ABC42A

Thank you.

Robert Sample · Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 4:58 am

INSPECT can replace characters but I don't believe it'll remove them. Your best bet is to write a loop using reference modification to look at each character and move it to an output string if it's not a special character.

rag swain · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:16 pm

Declare a WS variable with various 88 level item as special characters which you want to omit from the string. And then traverse through the string comparing with the WS variable, if does NOT match, put each one into an output field and if matches, read the next one. you can do the traversing by a looping.