Re: Using %TRIM in CL

[Peter Dow <petercdow@xxxxxxxxx>]

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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