Re: Spl2stmf and HPT

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It really depends on what you're doing any why...

You can call the QSPOPNSP, QSPGETSP, QSPCLOSP APIs to read the spooled 
file directly.  However, you should be aware that what you will get is 
actually the raw data in the spooled file.  This will be in SCS, AFPDS, 
or even a user-defined ASCII format, depending on how the spooled file 
was generated -- but this will be the fastest way to read it.  If you 
are just searching for a particular string in the spooled file, this 
should work fine.

The program you are looking at (SPL2STMF) does that, but then feeds the 
output into the host print transform API.  The HPT API can be used to 
translate the spooled file into another format.  This includes (with the 
proper WSCST) a plain-text format, which might be nice to have?  But if 
you're just searching fro a string, it's probably overkill.  The HPT 
function will require a lot more resources, and will slow things down 
quite a bit.

The CPYSPLF approach is faster than calling the HPT API, and will give 
you a plain text representation.  It does not include empty lines, 
overprinting, et al, which might be a problem for you?  Or it might not, 
depending on what you're doing.  CPYSPLF will almost certainly run 
faster than calling the HPT function, however.

It all really depends on what you're doing and why...  unfortunately, I 
don't know what you're doing, so I can't advise you further.


On 4/21/2014 1:46 PM, Jack Tucky wrote:
> Definitely CPYSPLF would be easier.  I'm trying to do this the API way which
> is the right way I guess.
>
> I don't need the STMF part of SPL2STMF, it's just the example I found and I
> thought it would be easy enough to modify it.
>
> If the only thing I want to do is look at the spool file with the API, do I
> need to do any conversion to the data retrieved?
>
> Jack