Re: Suppress leading zero of *DATE field

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi TA,

I wonder if you are confusing two different things?  There are two date 
related things you might be referring to...

1. The *DATE special field.  This is a numeric field, provided by the 
RPG compiler, that always contains the job date.  You might refer to 
this as "the *DATE field".

2. The date variable type. When you create a variable, you assign it a 
data type (A=Alpha, P=Packed, S=Zoned, etc) and there's a D=Date data 
type you can use.  You might refer to a field defined this was as "a 
date field" (notice that I did _not_ say "a *date field")


Anyway, based on your text, I'm wondering if you're confusing the two 
things.  Edit codes (such as Y) are only for numeric values -- so they 
will indeed work with *DATE, which is numeric.  So if the reference 
manual says that Y works with *DATE, it's absolutely correct.  (*DATE is 
_not_ a date field, it's a numeric field.)

If you want to format a date (data type) field, then it's easy enough to 
do...  For example, you could do this:

    myCharField = %char(myDateField:*USA)
    // result = 08/02/2011

Or if you want to remove leading zeroes you could trim them:

    myCharField = %triml(%char(myDateField:*USA):'0');
    // result = 8/02/2011 or 10/02/2011

If you want to remove leading zeroes from any of the components of the 
date, you'd have to do it yourself (more or less) but it's not hard.

    myCharField = %char(%subdt(myDateField:*MONTHS)) + '/'
                + %char(%subdt(myDateField:*DAYS)) + '/'
                + %char(%subdt(myDateField:*YEARS));

These examples are all in the USA format (MM/DD/YYYY), but they don't 
have to be...  you can replace *USA with other formats, applicable to 
different environments.

Does this help, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

On 8/2/2011 4:32 PM, Timothy Adair wrote:
> In the printer output specs of my program, I am attempting to suppress the
> leading zero on a *DATE field.  According to the RPG ILE manual (v6r1) I
> should be able to do this with a "Y" edit code.
>
> Unfortunately, the RPG compiler gives *RNF7059 (Editing is not valid with a
> field that is not numeric; the Edit Code or Edit Word defaults to blanks).
>
> Am I missing something obvious?
>
> ~TA~