IBM Mainframe Forum

My goal is to merge several files into one and, programmatically in the last step, insert a comma in the same columns on every record, then ship the results to an audience that will upload the data to an excel spreadsheet (hence the comma delimiters).

As preamble, I've been to the Syncsort manual and tried several examples (and several more plucked from search engine results), but when Syncsort inserts a value in the respective columns, it pushes all the data after the inserted character 1 column to the right, whereas I just want the commas inserted in place so the file length doesn't change.

Here's what my input looks like:



Here's what my sort step looks like:



Here's my desired output (column positions are approximate):



Here's what I get instead of desired output (the delimiters I wanted but the data gone):



My last shot was adding the "1,72" parm values to the sort card indicating I wanted to retain the data in columns 1 thru 72 while inserting the commas, but Syncsort didn't see it that way.

I feel like there's one eensy-weensy change to the sort card that will resolve this that I just haven't stumbled onto yet.

Hope this has illustrated my issue clearly. Thanks!

1) the parameter OUTFIL FIELDS= is considered as obsolete one; recommended to be replaced with BUILD=

2) in your case you need to use OVERLAY= in place of BUILD= (or FIELDS=), because BUILD= with explicit positions inserts blanks in between. RTFM.

These users thanked the author sergeyken for the post:

Mobius (Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:19 pm)

That fixed it. Thanks.