Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

In a pgm, while in the edit mode, I'd like to delete all the fields present from colum 40 to 50. What command may I sue to delete these?

Go into the Help and find out about Picture strings.

And look up BNDS as well.

William Collins wrote:Go into the Help and find out about Picture strings.

What are picture strings? I could not locate the details about them?

BNDS was helpful but they tough to use. If you forgot to reset them, they affect the entire profile!

Picture strings. Note that in z/OS V2.1 and above you can also use regular expressions.

You can also locate information on Picture Strings in the online help. Try FIND, Specifying the character string.

And, with the BNDS, use the SHIFT left comand - '('

If you keep the bounds line displayed you should not forget to reset them!

1. find an unused character in your data, like x'00'

2. Code: Select all

   change ' ' x'00' all

3. Code: Select all

   c p'=' '-' 40 50 all

4. Code: Select all

   c '-----------' '' 40 all

5. Code: Select all

   c x'00' ' ' all

And hope that your data doesn't contain any other sequence of 11 minus signs...

And the relevance of this to JCL is?????

Is there an easy way to work on point 1 if there are more character of different nature:

1.find an unused character in your data, like x'00'

If your data is "text" then any non-text value will do.

If you data contains packed-decimal fields, then chose any non-text whose hex-representation starts with A-F.

If your data contains binary fields, then you'd have to check, because any bit-combination could exist.