Re: ALTSEQ help

On 2015-01-27 14:01, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

I have a situation in which I need to sort a character (EBCDIC) array, 5
characters per element, using the ASCII/Unicode collating sequence
rather than the EBCDIC collating sequence.

Does anybody know of an easy way to do this? I'm thinking SORTA, but do
I want to do this by setting up the ASCII collating sequence as an
ALTSEQ (if so, how?), or do I want to do it by sending the array on a
round trip to Unicode, and sorting it as Unicode?

Using ALTSEQ would cause all the character comparisons in the module to use that collating sequence which you probably don't want.

I would assign the char array to a UCS-2 temp array, sort that temp array, and then copy the result back to the char array.

Here's a little example. It displays
DSPLY Ebcdic sort : @@@@@, aaaaa, 11111
DSPLY Ucs-2 sort : 11111, @@@@@, aaaaa

D arr s 5a dim(3)
D ucs2_arr s 5c dim(3)
/free
arr(1) = 'aaaaa';
arr(2) = '11111';
arr(3) = '@@@@@';
sorta arr;
dsply ('Ebcdic sort : ' + arr(1) + ', '
+ arr(2) + ', ' + arr(3));

ucs2_arr = arr;
sorta ucs2_arr;
arr = ucs2_arr;
dsply ('Ucs-2 sort : ' + arr(1) + ', '
+ arr(2) + ', ' + arr(3));
return;