Developer for System z Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, Version 4.1, Language Reference
Summary of changes
This section lists the key changes that have been made to
Enterprise COBOL for z/OSin Version 4.
The latest technical changes are
marked by a vertical bar (|) in the left margin in the PDF and
BookManager® versions.
Version 4 Release 1 (December 2007)
A new compiler option, XMLPARSE, makes it possible to choose between parsing
with the parser that is available with the COBOL library
(for compatibility with Enterprise COBOL for z/OS Version 3)
or with the z/OS XML System Services parser.
New XML PARSE capabilities are available when you
parse a document with the z/OS XML System Services parser:
Namespaces and namespace prefixes are processed using new special registers
and new XML events.
You can specify the document encoding using the ENCODING
phrase of the XML PARSE statement.
You can parse documents that are encoded in Unicode UTF-8.
The RETURNING NATIONAL phrase
enables you to receive XML document fragments in Unicode UTF-16
regardless of the original encoding of an XML document.
You can parse documents that reside in a data set or parse very large documents
a buffer at a time.
The XML GENERATE statement has been enhanced:
You can specify a namespace using the NAMESPACE phrase,
and a namespace prefix to be applied to each element
using the NAMESPACE-PREFIX phrase.
You can specify the code page of the generated document
using the ENCODING phrase.
XML documents can now be generated in UTF-8
as well as in UTF-16 or various EBCDIC code pages.
The WITH ATTRIBUTES phrase causes eligible elementary items to
be expressed as attributes rather than as child elements in the generated XML.
The WITH XML-DECLARATION phrase causes an XML declaration to be generated.