README.rst
This is a script to access data in a Microfocus COBOL database and export it. It runs on Python 3 and requires the argparse library (needs to be installed on Python < 3.2).
I'm not at all familiar with COBOL, and built this based on information I was able to gather on the web, and looking at hex dumps. It's not a proper library to work with these files, but a cludge to get the data out. It works for the files I need to process, and might need furter improvements for yours.
COBOL seems to have dealing with these types of databases built into the language itself. Unfortuately, the files itself do not contain a schema; the schema is written in COBOL code, in copybooks or FDD files.
As a result, to actually export the data, we need to define the fields that it contains. Lacking the original source code or definition files, this needs to be reverse-engeneered. This exporter uses an ad-hoc format to define the fields, rather than actual COBOL .FDD files.
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