HOW TO CONVERT VARIABLE BLOCK TO FIXED BLOCK ?

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HOW TO CONVERT VARIABLE BLOCK TO FIXED BLOCK ?..

Answer / sreedhar naidu dhekodna

VB to FB conversion
DFSORT makes it easy to do VB to FB conversion and FB to VB
conversion..
OUTFIL adds lots of tricks to your DFSORT toolkit,
including the ability to convert a variable-length data set
to a
fixed-length data set while sorting, copying or merging.
With the VLFILL=byte option of OUTFIL, you can even
do the conversion easily when "short" records are present.
The VTOF and BUILD operands of OUTFIL can be used to change
variable-length (e.g. VB) input records to
fixed-length (e.g. FB) output records. VTOF indicates that
conversion is to be performed and BUILD defines the
reformatted records. All output data sets for which VTOF is
used must have or will be given fixed-length record
formats.
Here's an example of OUTFIL conversion:
SORT FIELDS=(7,8,CH,A)
OUTFIL FNAMES=FB1,VTOF,BUILD=(5,76)
The FB output records for the FB1 data set will be 76 byte
records containing positions 5-80 of the VB input
records.
Only positions 5-80 of VB input records longer than 80
bytes will be used for the 76-byte FB output records.
But what about VB input records that are "shorter" than the
80 bytes needed to copy input positions 5-80 to the
76-byte FB output records? No problem. DFSORT automatically
uses the VLFILL=C' ' option with VTOF to
replace missing bytes in "short" OUTFIL BUILD fields with
blanks. So all of your short VB input records will be
padded with blanks to create 76-byte FB output records.
If you want to select your own padding byte, just specify
the VLFILL=byte option. For example, here's how you'd
use an asterisk as the padding byte for the previous
example:
SORT FIELDS=(7,8,CH,A)
OUTFIL FNAMES=FB1,VTOF,BUILD=(5,76),VLFILL=C'*'

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