Re: Using %TRIM in CL -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi BIll,

The problem is that CL does not understand variable length character fields. But %trim returns a variable length character field. When you use CHGVAR to set a character field to a variable length result, you get a plain old character field. And when you subsequently concatenate that with other fields, all the trailing blanks are there.

Rob's solution works because internally CHGVAR recognizes that the result of %trim is variable length and concatenates it correctly.

The old way is

CHGVAR VAR(&OUTPATH) VALUE('/HOME/XXXXXX/OUTBOUND/' *CAT +
&BATCHNAME *TCAT '.TXT')

which has the added advantage of replacing the vertial bars ('||') with characters that are invariant, i.e. their displayed graphic character is the same across most EBCDIC code pages (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.2?topic=sets-invariant-character-set-its-exceptions).

--
Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050
petercdow@xxxxxxxxx
pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On 8/31/2021 1:45 PM, Howie, Bill wrote:

Hello all,

I'm having a bit of trouble using the %TRIM function in a CL statement. Here's what I have:

CHGVAR VAR(&BATCHOUT) VALUE(%TRIM(&BATCHNAME))

CHGVAR VAR(&OUTPATH) VALUE('/HOME/XXXXXX/OUTBOUND/' || +
&BATCHOUT || '.TXT')

Both the BATCHOUT and BATCHNAME variables are character fields, 20 positions long. I was originally trying to do this with just the BATCHNAME variable alone, but that wasn't working, so I thought I'd try moving the trimmed value to a new variable, and that didn't work either. I'm basically trying to format a file name for the IFS dynamically. The value of the &BATCHNAME variable at the beginning of this is 'HCC-354' followed by 13 spaces. So right now the result of this looks like this: /HOME/XXXXXX/OUTBOUND/HCC-354 .TXT

Is there a trick to using %TRIM in CL that I'm not aware of? All info is, as always, much appreciated.

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