I have one of those annoying input files with fields that contain *either* blank-delimited words *or* quote-delimited strings. The program that generates it politely looks for the longest value in the first field and pads the field to that length to line them up in columns:
AMDSADVI PLX 'PL/X-390 V02 R04 M00' 'HLASM R5.0' AMDSAEDR PLX PLX241 ASMHL4.0 but it doesn't *report* that length, and the second field isn't present in every record (and of course the records are padded to a fixed length) so I can't just peek the first record to find its column. I need to do a bunch of manipulations on each field, taking out unwanted characters, using LOOKUP to replace some values, etc., and then put the whole record back together. Anybody have a handy way to split up a record with fields like this? I *think* I can trust that the quoted values never start or end with blanks, if that helps any. I suppose, given that, I could find the records where the first field starts with a quote, CHOP those AFTER STRING "' ", and just CHOP the others at a blank. ¬R
