Editing Numbers in CL, Take Two

November 30, 2005 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