by Robert Sample » Sat Jul 09, 2011 6:32 pm
Find the COBOL Language Reference manual on the IBM web site and read about the XML PARSE statement, available in Enterprise COBOL for quite some time.
And be aware that handling XML can be challenging since XML is treated as one long string of data and file reads on the mainframe are limited as to how long the record length can be. Usually you wind up creating a very large variable (the last time I did anything with XML, the variable was defined as PIC X(10000000) in the code), reading the file and storing each record in the very large variable, then using XML PARSE on the very large variable. Then you have to be prepared to handle the various tags returned by the parser.