MOVE/MOVEL and %Scan

["Nicolay, Paul" <paul_nicolay@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Barbara,

Have things changed, or do I get old ?

I guess I once tested MOVEL on a VARYING field, and got the result that it
also overwrote the first two bytes containing the length of the VARYING
field ?  Has this ever been the case, or is my memory really failing ?
Anyway, even like it is currently, I find it a dangerous construction as one
doesn't really know if the length of the data to MOVE will be the same as
the current length of the VARYING field (unless one anticipates such
behavior... but I consider that as "to be avoided implicit behavior")

I also encountered another issue that seems to be running fine now ?  In the
past when I was doing a %Scan and the search argument was bigger than the
actual VARYING string, the program crashed.  If I now try this... everything
goes fine (and it returns 0... as it should be in my opinion).  Again, am I
getting old ?

Kind regards,
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: bmorris@ca.ibm.com [mailto:bmorris@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: 06 March, 2002 18:12
To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Strange behavior w/%editc()



>Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 09:31:00 -0500
>From: "Nicolay, Paul" <paul_nicolay@merck.com>
>
>MOVEL doesn't work on VARYING fields, hence I wouldn't even think about
>using MOVE on them (while it might indeed still work).

Paul, MOVE and MOVEL work on VARYING fields.  They behave exactly
the same as if the varying field was a fixed-length field of the
current length.  If varfield has a current value of 'abcde', and
you MOVEL '123' to it, it will have the value '123de'.  If you
MOVEL(P) '123', it will have the value '123  '.  Using MOVE
instead, you would get 'ab123' and '  123'.

Barbara Morris