Hexadecimal value for pipe symbol in Cobol

CJT · New User Joined: 02 Aug 2007 Posts: 83 Location: Here

Hi, I just want to check if we have a hexadecimal value for pipe symbol in Cobol? and whether cobol can read a pipe delimited file? Any thoughts

Robert Sample · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 1:58 am

When did COBOL get its own character set? I thought it used EBCDIC on the mainframe.

The COBOL Language Reference and Application Programming Guide do not have any references to 'pipe', which is a pretty good clue to your question's answer.

CJT · New User Joined: 02 Aug 2007 Posts: 83 Location: Here

I do know the '05' is the hexadecimal value for the tab character. I was just checking if Pipe also had one.

Robert Sample · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 2:15 am

The vbar is hex '4F' in the EBCDIC collating sequence.

Douglas Wilder · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 3:13 am

COBOL can read files "delimited" by almost anything, but it is up to the programmer to code what to do with it after it is read. The question I have about this is where is the file coming from. If this file is being created in ASCII on a PC and then uploaded to the MF, you should test your method of converting from ASCII to EBCDIC to see how this character is converted. The easiest type of field to process in COBOL is fixed length fields. Would the "pipe delimited file" have variable length fields?

Terry Heinze · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 4:19 am

X'4F' is a vertical bar '|', and what is referred to as a pipe or broken vertical bar is X'6A'.