Special character changed after a WRITE statement.

Problem:

Some COBOL code from another environment does a WRITE statement to a line sequential file but a special character is not written out as expected. The special character is less that 1F hex.

Resolution:

This is the default behaviour.

In Line Sequential files if there is a character less than x"1F" then a null is inserted before the character.

You can switch off this by using the COBOL Runtime switch (N) or a file handler config entry INSERTNULL.

If you set one of these options then your file will be produced as expected.