RPG developers who jump to the web and CGI programming soon learn that a stream-based syntax requires the use of certain control characters. Unlike native database, which uses structures and hidden attributes to control field size and starting and ending locations, HTML and XML rely on <i>tags</i>, agreed-upon syntax for start and end delimiters. You may be familiar with Comma Separated Values and the use of both the comma and the double-quote as the delimiters for that type of file. XML and HTML use much more verbose values as their tags or delimiters.

Tags do double duty; they separate data

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Sometimes a reader of this august publication asks me about a problem that I don’t face, and I reply with an academic answer. But when I face the same problem, my interest ceases to be academic, and I look for a more practical solution. Such is the case with the use of SQL to extract packed- and zoned-decimal fields from a string of character data.

In the January 19, 2005, issue of Four Hundred Guru, I answered a question from Mary, who wanted to create a logical

A banking client is requiring us to load a Verisign Class Secure Server CA – G3 certificate authority (CA) certificate on my IBM i box. But when I try to load it into Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), DCM gives me this error: “An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.” What’s going on?

–WC

This is a fairly common problem and it has an easy solution. The certificate won’t load because in addition to loading the bank’s Verisign Class Secure Server CA –