topic Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4. in SAS Programming

9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

kannand — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 03:43:40 GMT

Hello again,

I'm given a file that was sourced from mainframe but now is with me on Unix as a .txt file. There are some numeric variables stored in 4 bytes that were defined on the mainframe as 9(7) Comp-3 types in the corresponding Cobol copybook. I tried reading in a mainframe SAS pgm, a copy of this file available on the mainframe as PD4. and works fine. I ran the same code in Unix SAS but displays as "." so I tried reading with S370FPD4., PD4. , PK4 but no luck. any clue of what might be happening.

fyi - I am able to read the vars before and after this date vars with no issues. Should I be reading this in a different way ?

Thanks in advance.

Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

Reeza — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 03:51:11 GMT

What does it look like in text editor?

Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

kannand — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 04:07:37 GMT

in the first record, the data starting from 840 till 1881 is read as chars. The next 4 bytes starting with C followed by gibberish chars form the first comp-3 field followed by a 2 byte number followed by 2 more comp fields. The actual value of the first comp field is 1151123. Hope I'm clear. Thanks for looking into this.

Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

Reeza — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 04:33:25 GMT

Sorry...what should it look like.

I'm not that familiar with these types of things, but my guess is you may also need to change the encoding.

I could entirely incorrect though.

Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

SASKiwi — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 06:22:12 GMT

This SAS note will help:

http://support.sas.com/kb/56/654.html

Also to use S370 informats the data file must be copied from the mainframe to Unix using a BINARY transfer (no conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII). If the text fields contain readable letters (ABC) then the file was not copied in BINARY format.

Re: 9(7) Comp-3 read into S370FPD4.

kannand — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 05:07:19 GMT

Thanks @SASKiwi. You were absolutely correct.

I had to use SYSOPTS=":DATATYPE=BINARY:XLATE=NO" from Z/OS and on the Unix/receiving end, I used SYSOPTS=":XLATE=NO:" to transfer the data so the packed values are not disturbed in cross-platform transfer. The team sending this file wanted to use NDM hence I had to limit myself to test with it.

One thing I noticed was that, even values that were read as a character on Z/OS as $3. or $10. were transformed and ended up reading with S370FZn. format and $EBCDICn. format for a alpha value. It was fun hunting down those NDM options and formats.

I just wanted to give an update. Thx.