Re: DATE in *PRTF: Missing leading Zero

For the archives,

I remember this from way back in RPG II days.  The earliest manual I've been able to find from IBM is SC09-1818-00 System/36-Compatible RPG II User ’s Guide and Reference from June 1994.  The relevant part is on page 450 (PDF page 480):

"The Delta position is defined as the position in the edit word that is to contain the first, or leftmost, character of the data field"

"The First Zero (0)

 When to the right of the Delta position (see example 2): Leading zeros to the left of and including the position in which the zero appears will be suppressed, but leading zeros to the right will not be suppressed. Any constants to the left of the zero will print only if preceded by a significant digit. The zero is a replaceable character.

 When in the Delta position (see example 3): Leading zeros and constants to the right of the zero will print. The zero will not print in the first position of the output field. If the field contains leading zeros, a blank will print in the first position; otherwise, a significant digit will print.

 When to the left of the Delta position (see example 4): The results are described in the preceding paragraph, except that if the field contains leading zeros, a zero will print in the first position of the output field. The zero in the edit word is not a replaceable character and does not print. Note: Any zero or asterisk to the right of the first zero is treated as a constant."

That last sentence is the one that describes the "hack"/"feature". I'm pretty sure it was available when I was working on a System 3 Model 15D back in the late 1970s.

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*Peter Dow* /
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On 7/3/2020 9:22 AM, Joe Pluta wrote:

Yes, the hack is that it was an undocumented feature.  And I don't know when it was introduced, but I'm almost certain it was not available in the Silverlake release.  But that's a VERY long time ago, so I could be wrong... :)

On 7/3/2020 10:08 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

LOL - I have to chuckle at Joe's use of "hack" about this technique - it was always what you had to do, although it wasn't always obvious, as I recall. I just looked at the documentation, and none of the examples show exactly this kind of edit.

Vern

On 7/3/2020 9:49 AM, Patrik Schindler wrote:

Hello Joe,

Am 08.06.2020 um 14:43 schrieb Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Patrik, I have some dim memories of being able to hack the edit word by adding an extra zero to the front.  I haven't had a chance to try this today, but I thought you could add an "extra" leading zero.  So you could create an edit word like this:

'0bb/bb/bbbb' (where "b" is a blank)

Note that there are actually nine positions specified.  Then if you ran that against an 8.0 field, you'd get 00/00/0000 with no leading blank.  I could be mis-remembering this, but I just thought I'd bring it up.

Works like a charm! Thanks *a lot*!!

:wq! PoC

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