Find the Length of a Character String in CL

October 19, 2005 Hey, Ted

Numerous times over the years, I’ve seen this question: How can I find the length of the value in a CL variable? That is, how many characters are in a variable, ignoring trailing blanks? I needed the answer often enough myself that I created my own “clever” way to handle it years ago by creating a RTNLEN command. But I recently discovered an alternative that’s been around forever. It uses a single command, RTVMSG, and it works for character variables up to 512 bytes long.

Here’s an example:

dcl &myvar *char 256 value('Abcd') /* Can be max *CHAR(512) */ 
dcl &l_myvar *dec (5 0) 
 
rtvmsg msgid(CPF9897) msgf(QCPFMSG) msgdta(&myvar) msglen(&l_myvar) 

And that’s all there is to it. Use CPF9897 because it has no message text of its own–the returned length includes only the length of the supplied message data. It’s far from perfect because of the length limitation; but for perhaps the majority of cases, it works very well.

–Tom Liotta, PowerTech

That’s clever, Tom. Thanks for sending it in.

–Ted