FILEFORMAT (Multiplatform)

Identifies the format of the input file, and optionally, the character or characters that separate records in the input file.

Required: No
Default Value: STREAM
Data Type: AFP, Line

Syntax

FILEFORMAT={STREAM[,(NEWLINE=X'value')]|RECORD[,n]}

Options and values

The values are:

STREAM[,NEWLINE=X'VALUE')]

The input file has no length information; it is a stream of data separated by a newline character. Files with STREAM format typically come from a workstation operating system such as AIX® and Windows.

The NEWLINE keyword identifies the hexadecimal character or characters that delimit records in the data stream. The NEWLINE keyword supports a two-character line delimiter, which is common in data from DOS and Windows. The following example shows how to specify the FILEFORMAT parameter to process input data that contains two-character line delimiters:

FILEFORMAT=STREAM,(NEWLINE=X'0D0A')

If the NEWLINE keyword is not specified, the default line delimiter for ASCII data is X'0A' and the default line delimiter for EBCDIC data is X'25'.

RECORD[,n]

The input file is formatted in z/OS® record format, where the first two bytes of each line specify the length of the line. The length does not include the length of the two-byte prefix. RECORD format files typically are z/OS files that have a variable record format.

For RECORD,n files, the input file is formatted in such a way that each record is fixed length, n bytes long. The value of n is a number from 1 to 32767.