Help with COBOL field definition.

[Sunita R]

Does any one know ...what is the defination of highlighted field

IMG_20230209_231419_202.jpg

[Robert Sample]

It has 5 alphanumeric bytes followed by one space followed by 4 alphanumeric bytes followed by a space followed by a single alphanumeric byte.

[Sunita R]

Thanks Robert. What is the meaning of 'B' here?

[Robert Sample]

Your question is easily answered by looking in the Enterprise COBOL Language Reference manual, which tells you that the PICTURE clause character B is used for

For usage DISPLAY, a character position into
which an alphanumeric space is inserted.

Picture clauses can contain: A, B, E, G, N, P, S, V, X, Z, CR, DB along with 9, 0, /, period, comma, plus, minus, asterisk, and the currency symbol. Some of these are floating, some of them are fixed, some of them can occur just once while others can occur multiple times.

[Sunita R]

Thanks Robert.

Sorry to bother you but I have not seen this kind of picture clause and was taken aback. Thank you so much for your explanation, this gives a lot more to learn.