Let's look at the new %CHECK, %CHECKR, and %SCAN built-ins of CL.

Written by Bruce Vining

In last month's article, "How Would You Like That Character String Trimmed?," we reviewed the new CL built-ins %TRIM, %TRIML, and %TRIMR. This month, we'll look at three more CL built-ins that IBM has provided by way of 7.1 PTF SI49061. The new built-ins, which are supported with both the OPM and ILE compilers, are %CHECK, %CHECKR, and %SCAN.

Let's look at the new %TRIM, %TRIML, and %TRIMR built-ins of CL.

Written by Bruce Vining

Over the past year, IBM has continued to enhance CL in order to make our lives, as developers, easier. In the previous article, "New Support for CL Commands Lets You Know When a Command Ends," we saw how a PTF enables the system to call a program of your choosing when a given CL command completes processing. Likewise, in an earlier series of articles, starting with "Introducing the New Run SQL Command," we saw how, with a PTF, you can now run SQL statements directly out of your CL programs.

Since the System/38, we've had to deal with the implied 32-byte length of character parameters on the command line; this article provides the workarounds.

Written by Joe Pluta

It doesn't matter where I'm working, how skilled the staff is, whether it's new development or mature legacy systems, it never fails that every couple of years I come across the old (and I do mean old) 32-character limitations on character parameters passed from the command line. It's a simple issue, really, but one that still manages to confound us. It may be the greatest example in our community of how those who cannot learn from history (or steal from those who have!) are doomed to repeat it.

Find a character pattern within a variable.

Written by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "A CL Command to Scan for Characters," we built the command Scan Characters (SCNCHR). The SCNCHR command returns the position of the first character within a CL variable that is found in a list of search-for values. This month, we'll look at how to provide a Scan String (SCNSTR) command.

Find characters within a variable.

Written by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "A CL-Based Implementation of RPG Built-in %Check," we built the command Check Characters (CHKCHR). The CHKCHR command returns the position of the first character within a CL variable that is not found within a list of valid values. Based on reader requests, this month we'll look at how to implement a Scan Characters (SCNCHR) command. The SCNCHR command will return the position of the first character within a CL variable that is found in a list of valid values.

Find characters that don't belong!

Written by Bruce Vining

I recently received the following from Wayne R.: "I use RPG's %CHECK function to check if any characters are not valid. Is there something similar in CL?" RPG's %Check built-in, if you're not familiar with it, returns the first position in a variable that contains a character that is not in a list of valid characters. If, for instance, you had a variable with a value of 'cabbage', then comparing this to a list of valid values such as 'abc' would return a position value of 6. This is due to the sixth character (the "g") not being in the list of valid values ('abc'). If all characters in the variable are found in the valid character list, %Check returns a position value of 0. While CL currently does not have a built-in such as RPG's %Check, you will see it's not that difficult to create a CL command to provide this function for programming our IBM i—and in fact that's what we'll do in today's article.

Take advantage of being able to join files with SQL.

Written by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "Run-Time Selection Using the RUNSQL CL Command," we saw how to build an SQL statement on the fly, selecting specific records/rows from the file/table SAMPLE. In this article, we'll look at how to combine information across files using the RUNSQL CL command. But before combining information, we first need to define that information, which will be accessed external to the file SAMPLE.

Build the RUNSQL SQL statement on the fly.

Written by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "More on the RUNSQL CL Command," we saw how to select specific records from the SAMPLE database using the RUNSQL command. In that article, we hardcoded the selection criteria of Effective date (EffDate) being earlier than May 1, 2012. This month, we'll look at how to allow a user to interactively specify the Class, Status, and EffDate year values that the user is interested in. This will include the ability for the user to also ignore (that is, not select on) any one or more of these three fields/columns.