COBOL to ascii conversions

[sweetblood]

I have a bunch of data files along with COBOL copybooks. I need to convert these COBOL data files to ascii. I suspect I'll need to use pack/unpack to get at these data, but I don't have the foggiest notion where to begin. I do have perlpacktut and Pack/Unpack Tutorial, I have not read them as yet but will start as soon as I finish this post.

The copybooks I have look like this:

        01  CLASS-OUT.
            05  CCNUM-OUT               PIC  X(14).
            05  CCDESC-OUT              PIC  X(40).
            05  CL-OUT                  PIC  X(14).
            05  CLDESC-OUT              PIC  X(38).

or

       01  MASTER-OUT REDEFINES HEADER-RECORD.
            05  CC-NUMBER                   PIC  9(04).
            05  MTD-UNITS                   PIC  S9(07).
            05  MTD-DOLLARS                 PIC  S9(09).
            05  INV-ON-HAND                 PIC  S9(07).

I also have a COBOL reference that tells me that 'PIC X(14).' tells me that the data field is a 14-byte alpha-numeric field and that PIC S9(07) is a 7-byte signed integer. I'm just not sure how to get Perl to pass this as ascii.

I would really appreciate any suggetions on how to start.

Thanks!!!

Update: This is on an HP-UX with Perl 5.6.1

[VSarkiss]

You probably mean EBCDIC, which is an encoding, not COBOL, which is a language. You can use EBCDIC-to-ASCII converters (most often in mainframe file transfer programs). After that, you have a plain, fixed-width, ascii file to work with. It's usually a lot simpler than trying to do the EBCDIC conversion yourself.

As an aside, there are COBOL fields that are a pain to parse (COMP fields, specifically), but if you have plain X and 9 fields, you're OK.

Update
For example, once you have it in ascii, you can handle your first record with something as simple as:

($ccnum_out, $ccdesc_out, $cl_out, $cldesc_out) =
    unpack('A14 A40 A14 A38', $class_out);

Assuming $class_out contains the whole line. For more details on unpack, take a look at perlfunc:pack.

[fglock]

Check the Encode module:

use Encode;

...
from_to($data, "EBCDIC", "ASCII");