Cobol Copy Book
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I have a Cobol copy book which I would like to use to view data in a file. Is there a process where I can tell Notepad the name and location of the copy book and then load it into Notepad and review or edit a record displaying all the cobol field structure. Thank you.
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Never heard of “Cobol Copy Book”, but if the underlying storage of each record isn’t a separate text-based file, the answer to your question is “not natively”. If every record were stored in a big text file, you could view it that way, but it wouldn’t automatically go to some record (though
But assuming it’s not text: You might be able to write a plugin to handle all the non-texty portion, but we cannot tell you how to do that. Or you might be able to get a program that outputs a record to a text file; if so, then you could use the NppExec plugin to automate the process of “run the record->text converter, then open the file that came out of that converter in Notepad++”
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@John-Knox said in Cobol Copy Book:
I have a Cobol copy book which I would like to use to view data in a file.
I did a bit of searching on the web and it suggests COBOL data files are likely to be in encoded format, so binary in nature. Descriptions such as “packed-decimal, Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) or “some type of binary” given that Standard COBOL has binary fields limited by decimal values (to the size of the PICture clause).” or “from AS400, COBOL data file using EBCDIC format”.
If so then Notepad++ is definitely NOT the right application. Notepad++ is a text editor and does not understand binary or otherwise encoded files. Whilst it can allow you to view them, the underlying structure is unknown to Notepad++ so text which may appear visually together can possibly be separated by the data structures involved.
However if the data is indeed text (so assumption it is of fixed width) then there is a plugin called “Fixed Width Data Visualizer” which can be used to visualise data structures. However there is no mention specifically of cobol copy book files, so if you were to try it you would need to experiment and possibly manually add in the data structure from the copy book yourself. That means you would need to be accurate in the structure as copied into the plugin (of course).
The plugin (for 64bit Notepad++) is here
Good luck
TerryEDIT: if you did open the COBOL data file does it seem like there is a structure to it and does it seem as though it has fixed width sections?
EDIT2: Try this link, several apps on Sourceforge which are likely to have a better chance than Notepad++
