IBM Mainframe Forum

Need some guidance regarding TRIM

I do understand

But what happens with TRAILING or BOTH

The only solution I can find out is to use "INSPECT REVERSE" to count chars for leading space to find out how many chars that is significant
Any other solutions?

Since you didn't tell us what your desired result is, it is difficult to know how to reply to you.

However, I will say that using TRIM for trailing and putting the result in a variable will usually not result in what you expect. Why? TRIM in this case would reduce the string to the number of characters (seven in your example) that end with the final non-blank character. It will then move the result into a nine-character variable and the move result means the last two characters of the variable will be set to blanks since the variable MUST have nine characters.

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LasseH (Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:48 am)

You need to show here not what (probably) WILL BE displayed, but what ACTUALLY IS displayed

Your result is in contrary with the original description of the function TRIM.

Examples
- FUNCTION TRIM(" Hello, world! ", LEADING) returns "Hello, world! "
- FUNCTION TRIM(" Hello, world! ", TRAILING) returns " Hello, world!"
- FUNCTION TRIM(" Hello, world! ") returns "Hello, world!"
- FUNCTION TRIM(" ") returns ""
- FUNCTION TRIM("") returns ""

I recommend yo to carefully test your own code: the exact value of each variable at each step.

sergeyken

Yes I read the manual also and the result shown there is if You do a

But what use do I have in a MOVE situation?

Robert Sample wrote:Since you didn't tell us what your desired result is, it is difficult to know how to reply to you.

However, I will say that using TRIM for trailing and putting the result in a variable will usually not result in what you expect. Why? TRIM in this case would reduce the string to the number of characters (seven in your example) that end with the final non-blank character. It will then move the result into a nine-character variable and the move result means the last two characters of the variable will be set to blanks since the variable MUST have nine characters.

This type of functions can only return 1 variable as result.
I have to caluculate the actual length of significant characters by myself, correct?
My question was mostly, do we have a smart way of finding the length?

do we have a smart way of finding the length?

produces results of

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LasseH (Thu Dec 15, 2022 3:08 pm)

tnxs, that's an ok solution

Trying to use a variable containing the option leading/trailing/blank in the "call" to TRIM but the compiler rejects that.
I understand the errormessage, but....
Is it possible to do that in some way?

LasseH wrote:Trying to use a variable containing the option leading/trailing/blank in the "call" to TRIM but the compiler rejects that.
I understand the error message, but....
Is it possible to do that in some way?

Result
IGYPS2292-S Function argument "OPTION" did not have the correct type for function
            "TRIM".  The statement was discarded.                  

This doesn't make any sense, from COBOL syntax point of view.

The COBOL options must be specified as they are described; no intermediate variable is possible.

LasseH wrote:Trying to use a variable containing the option leading/trailing/blank in the "call" to TRIM but the compiler rejects that.
I understand the errormessage, but....
Is it possible to do that in some way?

Select all

01 option pix x(7).
move 'leading' to option
move function trim(checkfield, option) to field

Result
IGYPS2292-S Function argument "OPTION" did not have the correct type for function
            "TRIM".  The statement was discarded.                  
 

FYI:
There is no correct option PIX in COBOL.
Since you did not get a compiler error on that line, I suspect that your demonstration is either partial fake, or fake in full?