Frank, First let me say: "Very cool, man!" I was inspired by your 30 minutes to take a few of my own to see if I could duplicate your experiment in our somewhat more staid (i.e., no PDSE's for application COBOL load modules) environment, and sure enough I can. I had to make a couple of small changes to your code to accomplish my test:
1. Remove PROCESS cards and default to shop-standard PGMNAME(COMPAT) and DYNAM 2. Change underscores to hyphens in the data names 3. Add "using" and "returning" parameters to the "regerror" call, which I guess never caused you a problem due to no errors happening at execution time 4. Use double-quotes instead of apostrophes around the called program names due to an internal application standard requirement (don't ask, long story) So below is my revised copy of your code, which works when compiled to a load module in a PDS and produces the same output as you got. Thank you for taking the time to show us how to do this! Peter Revised code: identification division. program-id. "TSTREGEX". data division. working-storage section. 01 regex. 05 re-nsub comp-5 pic s9(8). 05 re-comp pointer. 05 re-cflags comp-5 pic s9(8). 05 re-erroff comp-5 pic s9(8). 05 re-len comp-5 pic s9(8). 05 re-ucoll comp-5 pic s9(4) occurs 2. 05 re-lsub pointer occurs 10. 05 re-esub pointer occurs 10. 05 re-map display pic x(256). 05 re-shift comp-5 pic s9(4). 05 re-dbcs comp-5 pic s9(4). 77 reti comp-5 pic s9(8). 77 msgbuf display pic x(100). 77 lmsgbuf comp pic s9(8). procedure division. call "regcomp" using regex content z"^a[[:alnum:]]" value 0 returning reti if reti is not equal to zero display 'Could not compile regex' stop run end-if call "regexec" using regex content z'abc' value 0 0 0 returning reti perform check-reti call "regexec" using regex content z'qxp' value 0 0 0 returning reti perform check-reti call "regfree" using regex goback. check-reti. evaluate reti when zero display 'match' when 1 display 'no match' when other move length of msgbuf to lmsgbuf call "regerror" using regex msgbuf lmsgbuf returning reti display 'Regex match failed: ' msgbuf stop run end-evaluate . end program "TSTREGEX". -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Frank Swarbrick Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2013 2:17 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Announcing PCRE 8.33 for native z/OS Not to discourage you, as I'm sure porting PCRE to z/OS is a fine idea, but it would not be true to say that regex processing is not available for COBOL (or PL/I) on z/OS. I was looking through the IBM XL C/C++ for z/OS Run-Time Library Reference the other day (god knows why, since I don't even have access to XL C/C++) and noticed that there were some regular expression features. So I just took about 30 minutes and came up with this COBOL program (based on C code found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1085083/regular-expressions-in-c-examples): <Prior version of regex COBOL code snipped to shorten email> It compiles and runs fine, with the following results: match no match Pretty cool, I must say! FWIW, I didn't need to have the regex data item be the group data item as above. I could have just made it a DISPLAY PIC X(364), since I'm not referring to any of the fields within the group in my COBOL program. Frank -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN