Re: Display file attributes

[Douglas Handy <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

> And those two tiny characters might be a two and a zero stacked funny for
> hex(20).  I remember that and at times I miss it too.  

They were always 2 nearly stacked hex digits, with the top being
either 2 or 3, and the bottom being 0-F and slightly offset to the
right.  But very readable.  Bytes which were null instead of blank had
a small centered dot.  Hitting the test mode switch made for a very
quick and easy way to see exact field sizes, attributes, see that
non-displayed fields existed, etc.

>I'll have to remember the suggestion about STRCPYSCN.

Another thing I used to do when I first switched to 5250 emulation (on
a 8088 floppy based PC) was a little Basic program which used the APIs
to examine and modify the current emulated display buffer.  I could
toggle over to the DOS side and examine any bytes, plus I had a
keystroke which would replace any attribute byte with a "*" character.
 This caused the emulation to immediately update the display
effectively making the entire display normal text (ie no HI, RI, BL,
or CS) and also causing the current contents of non-displayed fields
to be visible, with every field delimited by the * pairs, at least if
they had an attribute byte.

It was how I made up for the lack of the 5251-11 test mode switch back
when I was still playing around with my own data streams.  As soon as
the host sent a new screen format, it was back to proper display
attributes again.

I'll have to admit I don't think I've really cared about the lack of a
q&d method of doing this for probably 15 years now...

Doug