JCL - Get count of non space chars in a given area (mainframe)

Question

I need to prepare some input data to run through a program, the data should be in the following format.

 UID (1-11)|TxtLen (12-16)| Text (17-62)

Answer 1

I've done ad-hoc conversions like this using a REXX program. The program is pretty straight-forward:

• allocate the input and output files
• open both files begin loop:
• read the input
• extract the text field and strip trailing spaces
• get length of trimmed text field and format as 5-digit numeric
• overlay number back into record in the Len field positions
• write out updated record repeat loop until end of file
• close both files
• free allocated files

Let me know if you need some actual code. I've found that REXX is superior than COBOL when it comes to string functions and manipulations. I've even created and called REXX routines from COBOL to accomplish just that.