Splitting data items (UNSTRING)
Use
the UNSTRING statement to split a sending field into several receiving
fields. One UNSTRING statement can take the place of several MOVE
statements.
In the UNSTRING statement you can specify:
- Delimiters that, when one of them is encountered in the sending field,
cause the current receiving field to stop receiving and the next, if any, to
begin receiving
(DELIMITED BY phrase)
- A field for the delimiter that, when encountered in the sending
field, causes the current receiving field to stop receiving (DELIMITER
IN phrase)
- An integer data item that stores the number of characters placed in
the
current receiving field (COUNT IN phrase)
- An integer data item that indicates the leftmost character position
within the sending field at which UNSTRING processing should begin
(WITH POINTER phrase)
- An integer data item that stores a tally of the number of receiving
fields that are acted on (TALLYING IN phrase)
- Action to be taken if all of the receiving fields are filled before the
end of the sending data item is reached
(ON OVERFLOW phrase)
The sending data item and the delimiters in the DELIMITED BY
phrase must be of category alphabetic, alphanumeric, alphanumeric-edited, DBCS,
national, or national-edited.
Receiving data items can be of category alphabetic, alphanumeric,
numeric, DBCS, or national. If numeric, a receiving data item must be zoned
decimal or national decimal. If a receiving data item has:
- USAGE DISPLAY, the sending item and each delimiter item in
the statement must have USAGE DISPLAY, and each literal in the
statement must be alphanumeric
- USAGE NATIONAL, the sending item and each delimiter item in
the statement must have USAGE NATIONAL, and each literal in the
statement must be national
- USAGE DISPLAY-1, the sending item and each delimiter item
in the statement must have USAGE DISPLAY-1, and each literal in the
statement must be DBCS
Example: UNSTRING statement
related concepts
Unicode and the encoding of language characters
related tasks
Handling errors in joining and splitting strings
related references
UNSTRING statement
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
Classes and categories of data
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
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