Re: How to detect a letter?

I have never needed to do this, but one way that comes to mind would be something like this:

dcl-c alpha 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
dcl-s replchar char(52) inz(*allx'41')

tempvar = %xlate(alpha:replchar:your-var);
if (%scan(x'41': tempvar) <> 0);
// had a letter in it.
endif;

Basically, xlate all letters to a weird character (one the user would not type) and then check if that character is in the string. The xlate eliminates the need to loop through all possible letters.

If what you need is more complex than that (not just testing for a letter, but a sequence of things that includes a letter amongst other things) then you might consider regular expressions, too.

-SK


On 12/9/2015 10:53 AM, Koester, Michael wrote:

I'm guessing that someone has already had to do this:
I need to validate that a string contains a letter (A-Z or a-z) as part of an edit routine for valid email passwords.

I could brute-force this with for-loops scanning for each letter, but I suspect there is a more elegant solution. Ideas? Preferred solution would be RPG and/or SQL supported by v7.1.

(Hoped to find a previous discussion of this in the archives, but my creativity failed me for getting the right search words.)
Many thanks.

Michael Koester
Programmer/Analyst
DataEast - Granite State Communications