Editing Numbers in CL, Take Two

Hey, Ted:

I just read Cletus' tip on the editing of numbers in CL procedures, called Editing Numbers in CL. I will add these techniques to my tool kit. As always, thanks for the great stuff. Here's another method I've used to remove leading blanks from numbers in CL.

--Russ

Russ's method uses a message description that has a four-byte binary variable. Here's how it works. (This following code is mine, not his, so any mistakes are also mine.)

Let's use the example from the previous article. Variable &CustOrders contains the number of orders that have been added to a database file. Our job is to load the number of orders, without leading blanks, into the &AlphaNum variable.

First, a few variable declarations.

dcl  &CustOrders   *dec      10 
dcl  &AlphaNum     *char     10 
dcl  &BinVar       *char      4 

Second, a message description that defines a four-byte binary variable.

CrtMsgf    Msgf(Qtemp/TempMsg)      
MonMsg     MsgID(CPF2112)           
AddMsgd    MsgID(TMP1001) Msgf(QTEMP/TEMPMsg) Msg('&1') +  Fmt((*BIN 4)) 
MonMsg     MsgID(CPF2412) 

The MONMSG message commands keep the CL procedure from erroring out during a rerun.

As before, variable &CustOrders has the number of orders. Convert the number of orders to binary format.

RtvMbrd    File(ORDERS) NbrCurRcd(&CustOrders)  
ChgVar     Var(%BIN(&BinVar)) Value(&CustOrders) 

Now, retrieve the message description into a CL variable. In the process, the system applies the number of orders to the message.

 RtvMsg     MsgID(TMP1001) Msgf(Qtemp/TempMsg) + 
             MsgDta(&BinVar) Msg(&AlphaNum)

At this point, &AlphaNum contains the number of records in the ORDERS file, left-adjusted.

Thanks to Russ for submitting this editing technique.

--Ted

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Editing Numbers in CL