COBCH0217S Preceding item at this level has zero length

Hi Herbert,

This can't work with visual Cobol 5.x
do you have the rm directive? (for RyanMac Compiler)

Use this, that will be better and must works:

01 L-VD-Daten.
    02 MOVE-LVDDATEN.
         03 Gesamt.
              05 VNR PIC S9(8)  sign leading separate.

Why you want to have the sign separate? leading or trealing!

I hope this will help you.

Claude Greiner

Specifying options like SIGN IS LEADING SEPARATE at the 01 level is part of standard ANSI COBOL, and has the effect that all numeric items within the group have the specified sign format.

I found that the code did compile fine with VC 5.0, so I suspect that we are missing some context.  Can you try compiling just the following as a separate program?

01 L-VD-Daten sign leading separate.
02 MOVE-LVDDATEN.
03 Gesamt.
05 VNR PIC S9(8).

      move 3 to vnr

      display vnr

It should compile fine, and when you run it you should see the following display:

00000003

If, as I suspect, this all works, then I think you will have to give us a bit more of the program that's showing the problem.

Thanks for your rapid answers !

I created new Copybook-JVM-Java projects, now it works fine ...

Maybe some difference in the compiler configuration ?!

Herbert