Re: Find all occurences of alpha characters in a string

From: "Art Tostaine, Jr." <artjr@link400.com>
To: <rpg400-l@midrange.com>
Subject: Find all occurences of alpha characters in a string
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 09:09:11 -0500
Reply-To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
Art wrote:
>I have a field that I am trying to seperate into alpha and numeric.
>
>Examples would be:
>
>"C 123456"
>"1234567C'
>"C1  12345678"
>"C123456"
>
>I want any alpha's in one field and any numerics in another alpha
>field.  I will use Barbara's GETNUM to convert the numeric portion
>to a real number later.
>
>What's the best way to do this?

This looks like a job for regular expressions.  Check this link
<http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?128@66.QHbZauGuiGY^8@.3d778947>
for a discussion of calling functions "regexec()" and "regcomp()"
from RPG programs, including an example of the use of these
functions.  It's not the easiest thing to code (at least in
languages like RPG or C), but regular expressions offer a great
deal of power in the areas of string matching and extraction.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com