I'm a little late to the party, but here's my solution.  Yes, the STRING
statement is helpful.  I don't advocate using an apostrophe to delimit
nonnumeric literals, preferring to stick with standard COBOL.  And yes,
QUOTE is a figurative constant guaranteed to give you a quotation mark.

Here's a sample program:

000100  IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.                            
000200  PROGRAM-ID. COBTEST.                                
000610  DATA DIVISION.                                      
000620  WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.                            
000630  77  ONE-COMMA    PIC X       VALUE ",".             
000640  01  1ST-ITEM     PIC X(6)    VALUE "ITEM 1".        
000650  01  2ND-ITEM     PIC X(6)    VALUE "ITEM 2".        
000660  01  3RD-ITEM     PIC X(6)    VALUE "ITEM 3".        
000670  01  MY-RECORD    PIC X(72).                         
000700  PROCEDURE DIVISION.                                 
000800  1000-START.                                         
000900      INITIALIZE MY-RECORD                            
001000      STRING  QUOTE 1ST-ITEM QUOTE ONE-COMMA          
001010              QUOTE 2ND-ITEM QUOTE ONE-COMMA          
001011              QUOTE          QUOTE ONE-COMMA          
001012              QUOTE          QUOTE ONE-COMMA          
001013              QUOTE 3RD-ITEM QUOTE                    
001014              DELIMITED SIZE                          
001015              INTO MY-RECORD                          
001016      DISPLAY MY-RECORD                               
001020      STOP RUN.       
001100  END PROGRAM COBTEST.

Here's the output:

"ITEM 1","ITEM 2","","","ITEM 3"

Walter


-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Newton, Ernie
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 10:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] Fun with COBOL


Greetings,

It's been a long time since I wrote COBOL, and I have an elementary
question about creating a comma-delimited file.

If I want...

"item one", "item two","","","item three"

How do I create the "," between item one and item two?  Is it simply PIC
"","" (quote comma quote inside double quotes?)

And the ","",""," would it be the same?  Just put that inside double
quotes?

Something tells me that there is an escape sequence, but the mind is not
cooperating.

Thanks,

Ernie

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