I can't get the Copy Replacing to work

[Graham Knight]

I'm trying to replace to beginning of the varibles in a copybook with the replacing option on the copy statement but it does seem to work. What am I doing wrong?

Attached is the copybook and an extract from the program listing. What I was expecting was the first part of varible name to be replaced but it seems that the whole varible has been replaced. The program has a clean compile accept for two warnings about "warning: line not terminated by a newline" at the end of the copybook inclusion.

COPYEXAM.CPY is the copybook.

The following is the compiler output.

000042           01 WS-SCR003.
000043              COPY COPYEXAM REPLACING ==:OO:==
000044                   BY ==SCROO3==.
000001C       * start of copybook
000002C       *
000003C
000004C            02 SCROO3 PIC X(9)
000005C                                    VALUE ALL " ".
000006C            02 SCROO3 PIC X(50)
000007C                                    VALUE ALL " ".
000008C            02 SCROO3 PIC X(100)
000009C                                    VALUE ALL " ".
000010C            02 SCROO3 PIC X(100)
000011C                                    VALUE ALL " ".
000012C       * end of copybook

[Ralph Linkletter]

I would suggest trying "(" and ")" instead of the ":"
The syntax below works as expected.

05  (TAG12345)-RECFM             PIC  X(04). 
   COPY 'MVSGETCT.CPY' REPLACING ==(TAG12345)== BY ==GETCT1==.  

Although the specification implies either will work.
"Because many of the separators have special significance when processing a COPY statement, the values that can be used for delimiting part of a text word in this way are limited to the parenthesis and colon symbols."

[Brian Tiffin]

Works here. But I did re-save the COPYEXAM.CPY with vim after download to get rid of the no terminating new-line warning. VIm adds a final newline.

::cobolfree
prompt$ cobc -E copytry.cob 
#line 1 "copytry.cob"
 identification division.
 program-id. sample.

 data division.
 working-storage section.
 01 ws-scr003.


#line 1 "COPYEXAM.CPY"



 02 SCR003-SCR002-O01 PIC X(9)
 VALUE ALL " ".
 02 SCR003-SCR002-O02 PIC X(50)
 VALUE ALL " ".
 02 SCR003-SCR002-O03 PIC X(100)
 VALUE ALL " ".
 02 SCR003-SCR002-O04 PIC X(100)
 VALUE ALL " ".

#line 8 "copytry.cob"


 procedure division.
 sample-main.
 display ws-scr003
 goback.
 end program sample.

prompt$ cobc --version
cobc (GnuCOBOL) 3.1-dev.0
...

Given
       01 ws-scr003.
          COPY COPYEXAM REPLACING ==:OO:==
               BY ==SCR003==.

I'd look to see if any stray unicode / extraneous bytes slipped in to any of the source files.

Cheers,
Blue

[Mickey White]

did you try putting both in single quotes or double qoutes ?

[Vincent (Bryan) Coen]

Following on from Mickey post try doing :

     COPY COPYEXAM REPLACING ":OO:"
                 BY "SCROO3".


                 That said, I would have thought that your usage should work !!!


                 Please always specify version and platform  i.e., v3.1 dev-0 and Linux

                 etc.

[Graham Knight]

Using quotes gives a syntax error.

Sorry but I'm using GnuCOBOL 3.1-rc1 (30Jun2020) with MinGW binaries
(GCC 6.3.0, PDcurses 4.1.99, GMP 6.2.0, VBISAM 2.0.1)
on win 10.

[Graham Knight]

Hi everyone,

I have found a way to make it work byi using the LEADING with the REPLACING. :-)

000038 01 WS-SCR002.
000039 COPY COPYEXAM REPLACING LEADING ==OO== BY ==SCROO2==.
000001C * start of copybook
000002C *
000003C
000004C 02 SCROO2-SCR002-O01 PIC X(9)
000005C VALUE ALL " ".
000006C 02 SCROO2-SCR002-O02 PIC X(50)
000007C VALUE ALL " ".
000008C 02 SCROO2-SCR002-O03 PIC X(100)
000009C VALUE ALL " ".
000010C 02 SCROO2-SCR002-O04 PIC X(100)
000011C VALUE ALL " ".
000012C * end of copybook