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Dear all,

We just converted our zOS cobol version 4 into Micro Focus COBOL  V6.0 revision 000 on Linux.   the XML PARSE won't accept empty attributes. Do we need to test for xml-text length, or is there a setting to tell the parser to ignore empty attributes?

Thanks James

Dear all,

We just converted our zOS cobol version 4 into Micro Focus COBOL  V6.0 revision 000 on Linux.   the XML PARSE won't accept empty attributes. Do we need to test for xml-text length, or is there a setting to tell the parser to ignore empty attributes?

Thanks James

What is the error condition that you are experiencing?

Can you please provide an example for this problem? 

What is the error condition that you are experiencing?

Can you please provide an example for this problem? 

Thanks Chris. 

As an example, when the following piece of XML containing file="", doc-number="" and appl-type="" is parsed by Microfocus XML PARSE function:

<ep-national-search-request lang="fr" dtd-version="v1.5" file="" country="FR" doc-number="" id="2113300">
   <fr-bibliographic-data>
      <application-reference appl-type="">
         <document-id>
            <country>FR</country>
...

The three attributes with an empty string as value are added as elements to the adm-xml-tag array, as can be seen at the following displays:

Start tag : fr-bibliographic-data
Start tag : application-reference
Attr Name : appl-type
Start tag : document-id
Start tag : country
Content (s) : FR
*------ Element depth ----------*
(1) ep-national-search-request
(2) file
(3) doc-number
(4) fr-bibliographic-data
(5) application-reference
(6) appl-type
(7) document-id
(8) country

When it should be something like the following:

Start tag : fr-bibliographic-data
Start tag : application-reference
Start tag : document-id
Start tag : country
Content (s) : FR
*------ Element depth ----------*
(1) ep-national-search-request
(2) fr-bibliographic-data
(3) application-reference
(4) document-id
(5) country

As happens at the mainframe: ( i am trying to attach a png image here to show how it looked on zOS)  

What is the error condition that you are experiencing?

Can you please provide an example for this problem? 

compiler option XLMSS  not COMPAT

What is the error condition that you are experiencing?

Can you please provide an example for this problem? 

my EPO colleague raised this with MF support last night.  ticket number is : 02190419

my EPO colleague raised this with MF support last night.  ticket number is : 02190419

So on the mainframe when there is an empty attribute then it will not even generate the ATTRIBUTE-NAME event for it but in Micro Focus it generates the ATTRIBUTE-NAME event but not the ATTRIBUTE-CHARACTERS event.

Yes, I can reproduce this behavior that you are reporting.

If I change the directive to xmlparse"compat" then it behaves differently in that both the ATTRIBUTE-NAME and ATTRIBUTE-CHARACTERS events are generated and XML-TEXT contains spaces for ATTRIBUTE-CHARACTERS.

Since you already have an incident open with support you should work directly with the engineer assigned to the case. Chances are that this will have to be raised as a defect and fixed in a subsequent version.

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