Re: Using an Expression to control a FOR loop

Arthur Marino wrote:

Speaking of negative numbers, as I've explained earlier, I'm reading
columns in a .csv file, which can contain a leading minus sign (and,
optionally, a decimal point). Then I'm building a character string that
conforms to the output file's DDS. So I handled the negative value in
the 'coldta' string by purging the decimal point and minus sign, and
then substituting J, K, L, etc. for the last 'digit' before appending
'coldta' to the string.

Can anyone tell me how I could just alter the sign portion of the last
byte to denote 'negative' so I wouldn't need the alternating tables?

The %DEC built-in function will take a string like '-123.45' and return a numeric value. If you multiply it by 10 to the power of your decimal places, you'll get a zero-decpos value with the same zoned-decimal data. If you then use %EDITC 'X' on the zero-decpos value and then substring, you'll get the result you want.

D len s 10i 0
D decpos s 10i 0
D string s 50a varying
D num s 63S 0
D val s 63A varying
D NUM_LEN c %len(num)

len = 5;
decpos = 0;
string = '-12345';
num = %DEC(string : 63 : 31) * %INTH(10 ** decpos);
val = %EDITC(num : 'X');
val = %subst(val : NUM_LEN - len + 1);