We sell a Commercial Parser for the COBOL language
A ready-to-go solution!

Why buy a commercial parser? In some cases, open-source parsers are available, so why consider buying a commercial parser?

Depending on your situation, you may need a parser that has been thoroughly tested and which is documented and has someone to call in case you encounter any problems.
We create and distribute a commercial off-the-shelf COBOL parser.
You may want to buy a Commercial Parser to have a parser ready for the integration, without any technical complexity and easy to integrate. A ready-to-go COBOL parser. 

Three reasons to buy:

Strumenta Playground

Strumenta Playground” allows you to try the parser and discover its features before you decide to buy it. Just register with your email and try it.

Yearly License

We provide a commercial license, which gives you access to the full documentation. You can choose a Standard, Distribution, or Service License, and our support is included with it.

Easy integration and Guarantee

We cover all technical aspects. We provide support, documentation, and best practices. Once bought, we offer a one-year guarantee extendable at your own convenience or a pay-as-you-go guarantee.

COBOL is a language that has been used extensively for decades.
Nowadays, billions of lines composing extremely valuable software are defined in COBOL.

You may want to perform several operations on your COBOL code, which our COBOL parser might help you with. Let’s discover them:

  • Code Analysis for Documentation & Metadata Extraction: the parser allows extracting structured information from COBOL code, which is essential for:

    1. Documenting an existing system, making maintenance and further development easier.
    2. Extracting metadata such as data structures, procedures, and dependencies.
    3. Generating diagrams, such as data flow diagrams and call graphs, to visualize system interactions.
    4. Supporting refactoring or migration, as understanding the current system is a key prerequisite for making changes.

    This is a common use case because COBOL systems are often large, undocumented, and critical to business operations. Gaining a clear understanding of the codebase is the first step before modernization, refactoring, or migration.

  • Migration to Modern Languages (Transpiling COBOL Code): the parser can serve as the foundation for a transpiler that converts COBOL code into Java, C#, or other modern languages.

    It provides a structured representation (AST) to facilitate code transformation.
    It also supports both full migration, which generates a complete COBOL replacement, and partial migration, which generates stubs for manual completion.
    Many organizations are moving away from COBOL due to the difficulty of finding skilled developers and the high cost of maintaining legacy infrastructure, making this one of the most sought-after use cases.

  • Automated Code Refactoring: the parser and AST representation enable structured modifications to the COBOL codebase. Common use cases include:

    1. Replacing outdated COBOL constructs with modern equivalents.
    2. Standardizing the codebase to enforce best practices.
    3. Removing dead code or optimizing inefficient logic.
    4. Updating API calls to interact with new systems.

    Some organizations prefer modernizing their COBOL systems instead of migrating them. Automated refactoring ensures cleaner, more maintainable COBOL code.

  • Code Compliance and Quality Assurance: the parser can be used to perform automated checks to ensure the code follows best practices and corporate standards. It can also identify potential security vulnerabilities or performance issues and ensure compliance with industry regulations (e.g., financial and healthcare coding standards).
    Many COBOL applications are used in heavily regulated industries. Ensuring compliance and security is critical but depends on company-specific policies.

  • Editor and IDE Support (Code Navigation, Syntax Highlighting, and Linting): the parser can be integrated into an IDE to provide:

    1. Syntax highlighting and error detection.
    2. Code navigation, allowing developers to jump to function or variable definitions.
    3. Linting to enforce COBOL coding standards.

    This rare use case benefits individual developers in maintaining large COBOL code bases.

  • Building an Interpreter, a Compiler or a Custom Execution Engine for COBOL:
    the parser can serve as the basis for an interpreter or a compiler, allowing COBOL code to run in non-mainframe environments.
    It can be used to create custom execution engines that execute COBOL logic in hybrid architectures (e.g., COBOL integrated with Java components).
    This is a niche use case and a fairly advanced one, which may be relevant to organizations with specific requirements.

How to use a parser to build these applications?

We offer the parser in two different formats, allowing you to choose the best approach for your needs:

Service: Access the parser via a cloud-based API.

Library: Integrate it directly into your applications using Java, Python, C#, JavaScript, or Kotlin. This would work without any connection to our API, if not for validating a key (i.e., no code would be shared with our servers).

Once you acquire the parser, we will provide comprehensive documentation to facilitate onboarding.
An introductory meeting will be held to guide you through the setup and integration.

For those needing additional expertise, we also offer advanced training, coaching, and support to help implement more sophisticated language engineering solutions.


How can I learn more?
Do you have questions?

You can schedule a quick meeting with our experts!

We suggest you fill out the linked questionnaire; this will allow us to better understand your use case and arrive well-prepared.

What does it matter in a parser?

We have built tens of parsers for our clients, written books and created video courses, written hundreds of articles, and given presentations on multiple continents. We have learned some important things in a parser to support what our clients want to build with them.

Our parsers provide an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), not a Parse Tree. This may sound like some academic term just thrown out to appear smart. It is not. The difference is that the output of our parsers is more high-level and easier to work with, and we think this could be relevant to you as well.

We provide AST libraries to process the output of our parsers. They permit you to work with the tree more easily to accomplish your goals. We know that as we have built interpreters, editors, compilers, transpilers, and other tools using those libraries, we built them as tools we needed to use in our work.

Error recovery: our parsers can deal with errors in code and recover them to build an AST. This is important for applications that need to process also incorrect code. This is always the case for editors, for example, as the user is constantly writing code, and until they are finished, the code is typically incorrect.


How can I learn more?
Do you have questions?

You can schedule a quick meeting with our experts!

We suggest you fill out the linked questionnaire; this will allow us to better understand your use case and arrive well-prepared.

Technical specifications, legal & license details

Our COBOL parser supports multiple COBOL dialects, continuously expanding to include new ones.

1. Our COBOL parser supports multiple dialects, and we continuously expand our coverage by adding support for new dialects.
2. If a specific COBOL dialect is not yet supported, we are happy to include it at no additional cost as part of our guarantee.
3. Although COBOL dialects may differ, they share many of their syntax and constructs, allowing our COBOL parser to be used immediately with new dialects from day one.
4. As part of our guarantee, we will fully support any construct from any COBOL dialect a client encounters.
We have worked with multiple codebases covering dialects such as COBOL-85, MicroFocus COBOL, ACUCOBOL, Visual COBOL, Fujitsu COBOL, and Tandem COBOL.


We provide a commercial license. You will get access to the documentation, tests, and build scripts used to develop the parser itself. You can choose a Standard, Distribution, or Service License. You will also get our support included with it.

Discover the COBOL Parser documentation!

You can find the full documentation for our COBOL Ready-to-Go parser here.

Strumenta Playground

Strumenta Playground is where you can evaluate the parser we build online. You can choose among several open-source examples source files and look at the output of the parser for that file – an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) representing the logical structure of the input file (and not just the grammatical decomposition of the source into keywords, identifiers, punctuation, and other elements).


How can I learn more?
Do you have questions?

You can schedule a quick meeting with our experts!

We suggest you fill out the linked questionnaire; this will allow us to better understand your use case and arrive well-prepared.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I need more information?

When you book a meeting, we will provide several resources regarding our methodology, including articles, webinars, and tutorials. If you want to learn more, don’t hesitate to book the meeting and email us!

Anything else you could help me with?

We are specialists in Language Engineering and can offer all these supporting services to ensure you reach your goals. Typically, our clients buy a transpiler to use as part of larger systems. Sometimes, they have all the internal skills they need to integrate. Still, they often ask us for training courses, support with the architectural design, or the implementation of the entire system for them.

Where can I find references and testimonials of other clients?

You can read some customers’ experiences and opinions in our session “Testimonials” You can also find some interviews in the section “Articles“: Interview with Rob Wunderlich or Interview with Campbell Pride.