Re: gnubol: Record delimiter clause and parse order

[fneale@tss.com.au]

Matthew Vanecek wrote.....

> I also did a couple of variable length writes, so I could get an idea of
> what MF does with writing variable length files.  I'm hard pressed to
> decipher them, however, even with a hex editor.  I've attached it, and
> the program I used to write it.  I can understand the basic
> structure--starts out at 6 bytes, then increases to 10 bytes, and
> presumably would add another 4 bytes when rec-len reaches 14, to give 18
> bytes, and so on. Any pointers on interpreting would be very much
> appreciated.  We don't really use variable length records in files.
> Actually, we do much more DB work than we do file IO at all...


From your programme, the structure of the variable length sequential file
is

     A 127-byte header block consisting of stuff only known to MicroFocus
     A record stream starting at 8 bytes in length with the first two bytes
     (&H40 &H01) indicating the length of the ensuing data followed by the
     data itself, padded with space characters until the length of the data
     exceeds 6 bytes, when we get
     12 byte records with the first two bytes (&H40 &H07) indicating the
     length of the ensuing data followed by the data itself, padded with
     space characters until the length of the data exceeds 10 bytes, when
     we get........

Do hope this helps.

Regards

Fred Neale



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