Dennis or others,
Can you expand a little bit further on the hard space? What it is? What the difference is between a hard and soft space? When I see a file with CHAR(255) it produces this character (ΓΏ) when I view the file. Is that expected? Will the IRS computers accept this as a space? I have another method that I've used for a very long time by placing a character at position 513, then stripping it using another piece of software I developed. This year I've added the state data to the irs record and would consider changing to something purely Rbase if I could get it to pass the irs computer system. Thanks for any input. Duey From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dennis McGrath Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:57 PM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Stripping "blanks" off the end of file lines You don't have to work that hard. Build up your text string and then use my sput suggestion to drop a hard space at position 255 and you are done! It is dead simple. You will wind up with soft blanks with a hard blank at the end. RBASE automatically fills a string with spaces when you sput beyond the length of the string. Example: Set var vtmp = 'xxx' Set var vtmp = (SPUT(.vTmp,char(255),512)) This will create a string of 3 x's followed by 508 spaces followed by a hard space. Dennis ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gray, Damon Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:47 PM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Stripping "blanks" off the end of file lines I believe I can make this work, because the last data element for each employee record is at position 489. thus I can append the required hard blanks with SPUT at position 490 to get the required 512 length. You have all be VERY helpful ... as always! ;-) ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 1:38 PM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Stripping "blanks" off the end of file lines Oh wow, if Dennis is right then that would be a problem.... If this is a fixed-length file, with everything in the same "columns", then you could create 2 variables of 250 each and then concatenate them together. But if the individual data elements are variable in length then that wouldn't work ... Karen Damon, I just checked the docs. SFIL only works to 500 characters! Dennis
