Re: Increment an alpha field by "1"

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What you say is true, though I'd add that you can do the same thing in 
RPG just by overlaying a 1A field with a 3U 0 field in a data structure.

The problem with your approach, Vern (you knew this was coming, right?) 
is that EBCDIC letters aren't always contiguous.  It's true that if you 
had A (EBCDIC 193) and you added 1, you'd get B (EBCDIC 194).  However, 
if you had the letter I (EBCDIC 201) and you wanted to get J, you'd have 
to add 8 since J is EBCDIC 208.  IMHO, it's easier to use an array when 
you increment instead of trying to use the numeric value of the letter.

I suppose you could convert you letter to Unicode (RPG's "C" data type) 
and add 1 there.  Unicode letters are all contiguous, so that'd work 
better.. but it still seems like a lot of screwing around.

vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Do it in C - that does this kind of increment nicely, since it treats
> characters as 1-byte integers, sort or - Scott will probably have to
> correct me!! But you'd still want to separate the 2 sections, numeric
> and alpha, and check ranges and overflows.
>
> Actually I'm not kidding!! ;-)