RE: Incrementing Character Fields

[Joel Fritz <JFritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sure there's a more elegant way of doing this, but here's a brute force
method:

Load an array with the alphabet.

Look at the rightmost character in the field you want to increment
        If it's less than 'Z'
                look it up in the alphabet and replace it with the next
character
                you're done     
                        else
                                replace it with 'A' and repeat the above one
character to the left 'til you've either
                                encountered total overflow or you're done.  

I've skipped the parts where you could check for invalid characters and
'ZZZ'

Don't like the LOKUP or LOOKUP much, but it's only over a 26 element array
and that seems fast enough.  Not enough elements for a bsearch.
-----Original Message-----
From: DAsmussen@aol.com [mailto:DAsmussen@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:24 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: Incrementing Character Fields


Hey Folks,

Here's an interesting exercise!  I'd swear that I've seen this done in RPG 
many moons ago, but the only practical example I can recall is from a long 
dead platform using an equally long dead version of BASIC.  Say you have a 
three character alpha field that needs to be incremented progressively like
a 
number (e.g., AAA, AAB, AAC...ABA, ABB, ABC...ZZX, ZZY, ZZZ).  Any ideas on 
how this could be done in either RPG or RPGLE?

TIA,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"The brain is a wonderful organ.  It starts the moment you get up and
doesn't 
stop until you get into the office." -- Robert Frost
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