Handling exponential formats in COBOL

balubhat · New User Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 19 Location: Singapore

Hii

Please let me know how to handle exponential data format in Cobol.

I have a file of fixed length format and one of the field is amount field which is having values like 5.6843418860808015e-14 .
But it also has values like 328.88899999999995. I need to define the copybook structure for this file. How should I declare a variable to handle this type of values?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Dsingh29 · Active User Joined: 16 Dec 2008 Posts: 132 Location: IBM

you can use 'E' in your pic clause....

E
indicates that the following digits are the exponential for a floating point number. For example PIC '9v99999e99'.

For more information:

http://www.felgall.com/cob1.htm.

BTW..it took me just 2 mins to google.

Robert Sample · Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:49 pm

I suspect you'll have to define the field as PIC X and use program logic to determine how to handle the contents. If you use an E in the PICTURE clause, I would think records without an E in the field would cause a problem. I have not had a chance to test this, though -- when I get a chance to, Ill post the results.

Kjeld · Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2011 3:33 pm

Is the precision really used for anything? These formats most of all look like values punched from some SAS program where the programmer didn't care or weren't instructed to specify a fixed precision format.

If you have a chance to challenge the input formatting, I would start there.