COBOL Strings, Here are Ideas (1 of 2)

INSPECT Verb plays a crucial role in string manipulation in COBOL. Best practical INSPECT VERB usages are given below. These are ready to use in your COBOL programs.

Converting to UPPER CASE

INSPECT FUNCTION UPPER-CASE(TextLine)
 TALLYING LetterCount FOR ALL Letters(LetterPos:1)

INSPECT…Tallying

INSPECT‥TALLYING counts the number of occurrences of a character in a string.

INSPECT…..to count vowels and consonants

INSPECT FUNCTION UPPER-CASE(TextLine) TALLYING
 VowelCount FOR ALL "A" "E" "I" "O" "U"
 ConsonantCount FOR ALL
 "B" "C" "D" "F" "G" "H" "J" "K" "L" "M" "N" "P"
 "Q" "R" "S" "T" "V" "W" "X" "Y" "Z"

Best examples of INSPECT…Replacing

INSPECT StringData REPLACING ALL "F" BY "G"
 AFTER INITIAL "A" BEFORE INITIAL "Q"

INSPECT StringData REPLACING ALL "F" BY "G"
 AFTER INITIAL "A" BEFORE INITIAL "Z"

INSPECT StringData REPLACING FIRST "F" BY "G"
 AFTER INITIAL "A" BEFORE INITIAL "Q"

INSPECT StringData REPLACING
 ALL "FFFF" BY "DOGS"
 AFTER INITIAL "A" BEFORE INITIAL "Z"

INSPECT StringData REPLACING
 CHARACTERS BY "z" BEFORE INITIAL "Q"

Best example of INSPECT….converting

INSPECT‥CONVERTING seems very similar to INSPECT‥REPLACING but actually works quite differently. It is used to convert one list of characters to another list of characters on a character-per-character basis.

INSPECT dat1 CONVERTING 'ABCD'  to 'abcd'.

INSPECT TextLine CONVERTING UpperCase TO LowerCase

Srini

Data Engineer with deep AI and Generative AI expertise, crafting high-performance data pipelines in PySpark, Databricks, and SQL. Skilled in Python, AWS, and Linux—building scalable, cloud-native solutions for smart applications.

2 responses

Mainframe:COBOL Strings, INSPECT,Concatenation, Splitting (2 of 2) | Srinimf

July 27, 2015 at 10:54 am

[…] Read my previous post on COBOL Strings-INSPECT VERB. […]

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Apply these Technics to handle Null-terminated Strings in COBOL | Srinimf

January 29, 2016 at 4:03 pm

[…] though I was busy in my work, I decided to spend some time for our readers on technical help. COBOL strings is a key subject and across all the big mainframe projects (Finance, Insurance and Manufacture) without strings […]

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