Re: Sorting a program described file

I follow all of that, Paul. The piece I am missing is that I want to have a logical file, and use that logical as an externally defined file in my RPG program. I am not wanting to sort on the 4-column, packed, 7/2 field, but I do want to get the right value for the field. How does the RPG program know that the field is a packed numeric and not a 4-char field? Where do I define that?

PaulMmn wrote:

A packed field can -only- have an odd-number of digits! Because you have 1/2 byte for the sign, either count the bytes by odd numbers (1-3-5-7) until you've counted up to the number of bytes, or calculate-- ((#ofBytes * 2) - 1). Even if you describe the field with even numbers, you still get an extra half-byte once the data's stored on disk.

As far as sorting... it doesn't matter if you have a character, packed, or binary field-- sorting on the field still comes out in the right sequence.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



At 11:49 AM -0600 12/24/08, Troy Foster wrote:

or 6,2

On 12/24/2008 11:46 AM, Booth Martin wrote:

I went back and looked at my source. sheeeshhh... I had already done
this back in 2003. But I had never made it work because I couldn't
figure out how to substring a packed field.

The program described file has columns 28-31 as packed, 2 decimals.
That is 7/2, right?
What is the SST? SST(field 28 4) doesn't seem right and I am not
even sure how to test it.
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