Re: Char to numeric conversion question

Scott wrote:
>     2) Assuming you're using a version of RPG that supports floating
>        point you could call the atof function from the ILE C
>        binding directories just by prototyping it and binding in
>        the service prgorams...

Best to keep away from floating point unless you're very
careful.  Unlike decimal representation, float generally
does not represent values exactly.  So, if you give atof
the string "25.02", you may well get back the float value
25.019999 as the answer.  If you're careful, you should
be able to deal with this for relatively small values.
But when you bump into the limits of float precision
(around 16 digits), you can never be sure of those least
significant digits.

As others have suggested, probably the best way is to
search for the decimal point, put the portions of the
string to the left and right of the decimal point into
a character subfield that overlays a zoned numeric
subfield, xlate blanks to zeros, and there you have the
value.  You'll need a bit of extra code to handle possible
leading negative sign as well as to scale the number
depending on the position of the decimal point.  The
important thing is to code this into a procedure.  Finally,
once you have a robust procedure coded, why not make it
public so that others can benefit?

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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