To write records or fields to a data file, type:

write may also be used to copy records to a data file. This is useful if you want to separate a particular card type from the rest of the data, or if you want to correct errors and save the corrected data in a new file for later tabulation.

To write records to a data file the command is:

to write the whole record to the named file, or

to write columns m to n only.

If you use write in a levels job to write data to a new data file, the statement write datafile at any level will write out data for that level only. Additionally, if the write statement is inside an if clause, or a return statement is encountered, then only relevant data is written for that level. To write out data for all levels, you will need one write statement per level.

In all cases, records are written in the state they are when the write is executed, and all cards read in with the current read are copied; that is, all cards for which thisread is true. For example, if thisread1, thisread2 and thisread3 are true, Quantum writes out cards 1, 2 and 3. To prevent any of these cards being written, you can set the appropriate variable to false (zero); therefore, to print only card 1 of the three cards, write:

Any number of writes to data files are allowed in the edit, and each one may write to a different file.

Records written by write are normally as long as the record length defined with reclen on the struct statement. You can change this with len= on the filedef statement. The exception is where records end with blank columns. In this case Quantum ignores the blank columns. To create a data file of fixed length records, and your data is single coded, use the reportn statement. If your data is multicoded you can convert it to single coded first by using the explode statement. For more information about explode, see Converting multicoded data to single-coded data.

If your data is multicoded and you need to preserve the multicodes, the only way of writing out fixed length records if the data currently has trailing blank columns is to insert a dummy code in the last column of those records.