Re: [EXTERNAL] Example of right justifying a character field.

Hi James

Nothing wrong with EVALR that I can see - it has to be used rightly, though - FOO is a fixed-length variable, so all those trailing blanks are part of it - you are trying to right-justify a 50-char value into a 50-char variable - and that is what you got. The DSPLY of BAR is correct.

According to the documentation for EVAL and EVALR - the former is padded or truncated on the right - the latter is padded or truncated on the left - EVALR does not strip trailing blanks, just as EVAL does not strip leading blanks - interesting, eh?

Cheers
Vern

On 2/14/2023 5:03 PM, James H. H. Lampert via RPG400-L wrote:

On 2/14/23 2:27 PM, Roger Harman wrote:

Why on earth would you do all that manipulation when a simple opcode
does the job?

Because that simple opcode *doesn't* do the job by itself.

Consider:

     D FOO             S             50A
     D BAR             S             50A
     D BAZ             S             50A
     C                   EVAL      FOO = 'FOOBAR'
     C                   EVALR     BAR = FOO
     C                   EVALR     BAZ = %TRIM(FOO)
     C     FOO           DSPLY
     C     BAR           DSPLY
     C     BAZ           DSPLY
     C                   SETON

If you compile and run this, you get:

 DSPLY  FOOBAR
 DSPLY  FOOBAR
 DSPLY                                              FOOBAR

If the EVALR were *all* it took to forcibly quad a string to the right, then the second line of the output would look like the third, not the first.

As to explicitly adding spaces on the left, that would only be necessary if you were using a version of ILE RPG that lacked the EVALR.

--
JHHL