title: Data Validation
body: <p>So I have entered my second semester of College and they have me doing a course called Advanced COBOL. As one of my assignments I have to my make a program that tests certain things in a file to make sure the input has no errors. I get the general idea but there are just a few things I don't understand and my teacher is one of those people who will give you an assignment and make you figure it out yourself with little or no help. So here is what I need help with.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>I have a field that the first 5 columns have to be numbers, the 6th column a capital letter and the last 2 numbers in a range of 01-68 or 78-99.</p></li>
  <li><p>one of my fields has to be a string of numbers with a dash in it like 00000-000, but some have more than one dash. How can I count the dashes to identify that there is a problem.</p></li>
  </ol>