Pete,
It is difficult to answer your question with the information you
provide.  COBOL supports several different formats for numeric data, as
do most languages.  There is zoned decimal (same as display, except the
last digit can contain a sign), packed decimal, where each half-byte
contains a decimal digit, with a sign in the last half byte (nibble),
and various binary formats including 16, 32 and 64-bit integers, and two
different floating point formats.  If you could post some before and
after data, we could possibly give you a more definite answer.

John Clogg

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Peter Osborne
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 11:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Packed Fields

Hi All,

I'm looking at a field in a dataset. It's an X40 field but it seems that
the 
data stored in it is server integers "packed" by a Cobol program. I've
used 
the program to change the values that are stored in this field and the
data 
is indeed changing but I cannot figure out how the data is actually
stored. 
Is there a formula on how one would unpack a field that has been packed
by a 
Cobol program?

Thanks,
Pete

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