Abstract: An XML Parser for COBOL that creates a structure, or table, identifying where in a given data stream a specific data element is located and the length of the element. For each data element tag in the XML data stream, the parser creates a row in a table containing the Tag Name, Field Length, and Field Size of the data element. Once the entire XML data stream has been processed, the parser returns the table containing the position and length of all data elements in the XML data stream. Thus, instead of receiving a virtually unintelligible (by COBOL) data stream, the COBOL program is given a table that serves as a table of contents, if you will, of the data elements in the message.