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[sub]

Hi,
I have a pipe delimited file with 10 fields in a variable file. When a field doesn't have any value, there is nothing populated.

For eg, the input file will look like this
ABC|sds|3432|||4||r|5||
A|343|rt|67|t|u|||||
abcd|45|45|dsf|tr|45|3|67|t|i|

If I want to extract only 3rd field to an output file from the above input file is there a way to do it using SORT?

Thanks,
Sub

[kolusu]

sub,

Use the following DFSORT JCL which will give you the desired results. I assumed that the 3rd field has a max length of 10 bytes. you can change it to whatever length you want

[sub]

Kolusu,
Thanks, the solution you had mentioned worked. I was trying to expand this solution to convert more than 200 fields from a variable length file to a fixed length file. But learnt that there is a limitation on the parsed fields. The IBM manual says "You can assign up to 100 %nn parsed fields (%00-%99) to the variable fields you want to extract."

Is there a work around for using it to more than 200 fields?
Thanks,
Sub

[kolusu]

sub,

Well you can split the job into 2 steps and extract the first 100 fields in step1 and the next 100 in the next step.

Alternatively you can write a program to get the work done
_________________
Kolusu
www.linkedin.com/in/kolusu