Re: %trim

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

JJW wrote:
> We recently had IBM do an analysis of some of our most
> used programs in terms of CPU usage.  One of the things
> they mentioned was that %trim was a big user of CPU.  Has
> anyone heard this about %trim before?

%TRIM() works by looping through the character value looking for the
first and last non-blank characters in the string.  If your program
makes heavy use of %TRIM() and long fixed length character strings,
it is certainly likely that a lot of CPU time will be spent there.
Whether or not that is significant depends on other things happening
in the program.

Generally, whenever a program makes heavy use of %TRIM(), you
probably should be using varying length character variables instead.
%TRIM() is often used just to find the length of significant strings
within fixed length character variables.  For varying length
variables, the length is maintained as part of the value, and so the
length does not have to be continually re-computed.

Hans