Initializing a table (INITIALIZE)

For example, to move the value 3 into each of the elementary numeric data items in a table called TABLE-ONE, shown below, you can code the following statement:

INITIALIZE TABLE-ONE REPLACING NUMERIC DATA BY 3.

To move the character 'X' into each of the elementary alphanumeric data items in TABLE-ONE, you can code the following statement:

INITIALIZE TABLE-ONE REPLACING ALPHANUMERIC DATA BY "X".

When you use the INITIALIZE statement to initialize a table, the table is processed as a group item (that is, with group semantics); elementary data items within the group are recognized and processed. For example, suppose that TABLE-ONE is an alphanumeric group that is defined like this:

01  TABLE-ONE.
  02  Trans-out  Occurs 20.
      05  Trans-code       Pic X    Value "R".
      05  Part-number      Pic XX   Value "13".
      05  Trans-quan       Pic 99   Value 10.
      05  Price-fields.
          10  Unit-price   Pic 99V  Value 50.
          10  Discount     Pic 99V  Value 25.
          10  Sales-Price  Pic 999  Value 375.
      . . .  
      Initialize TABLE-ONE Replacing Numeric Data By 3
                                     Alphanumeric Data By "X"

The table below shows the content that each of the twenty 12-byte elements Trans-out(n) has before execution and after execution of the INITIALIZE statement shown above:

You can similarly use an INITIALIZE statement to load a table that is defined as a national group. For example, if TABLE-ONE shown above specified the GROUP-USAGE NATIONAL clause, and Trans-code and Part-number had N instead of X in their PICTURE clauses, the following statement would have the same effect as the INITIALIZE statement above, except that the data in TABLE-ONE would instead be encoded in UTF-16:

Initialize TABLE-ONE Replacing Numeric  Data By 3
                               National Data By N"X"

The REPLACING NUMERIC phrase initializes floating-point data items also.

You can use the REPLACING phrase of the INITIALIZE statement similarly to initialize all of the elementary ALPHABETIC, DBCS, ALPHANUMERIC-EDITED, NATIONAL-EDITED, and NUMERIC-EDITED data items in a table.

The INITIALIZE statement cannot assign values to a variable-length table (that is, a table that was defined using the OCCURS DEPENDING ON clause).

Examples: initializing data items