To Unstring spaces in a field

Chidane · New User Joined: 25 Nov 2021 Posts: 26 Location: India

01 WS-A PIC X(7) VALUE ' S'.
01 WS-B PIC X(8) VALUE ' AB'
01 WS-C PIC X(5) VALUE 'CD '
01 WS-ABC PIC X(20)

I would like to remove all the leading spaces of WS-A and WS-B and Trailing spaces of WS-C and store the concatenated result in WS-ABC separated by hyphen char

sergeyken · Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2025 6:26 pm

You must present here:
1) the exact code you've tried to use (enclosed within Code tags), and
2) the exact result you've got after execution of your code (with any error/diagnostic messages, too).

Chidane · New User Joined: 25 Nov 2021 Posts: 26 Location: India

Thanks for the reply

sergeyken · Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2025 5:37 pm

Any string value, when moved (e.g. assigned, or set) to a variable of type PIC X(nn) is extended at the right side to the full length of nn characters with blanks.

This is exactly what you get. It cannot be recognized as "not correctly coming"; this is exactly what you requested from COBOL.

As a hint, take a look at this:
www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.3.0?topic=statements-string-statement

Also it makes sense to RTFM.