IBM Mainframe Forum

i don't want to do my processing in jcl but in COBOL.

looks like You did not care to try to understand my post ...

never said to process anything with sort, nor REXX
I just told to follow the same approach...
compile Your copybook and after that extract the info You want using a COBOL program instead of a REXX script
from the map You can infer for each field - the name, the format, the position, the length

i don't want to do my processing in jcl but in COBOL.

You cannot do it in JCL anyway because JCL does not manipulate data. But you will, most likely, need JCL to run your COBOL program.

Not sure of why u want to convert copybook.
A copybook is a description of data in a file or part of it. Its only to use fieldname and u get the value in the field for the post in the file.

If u want to know number of digits for integer part and fraction part and number of character in text-field its better to go in the map from compilation of a program using tha copybook.