IBM Mainframe Forum

hi guys,

Need your help.

i have the below code.

05 WS-SYMBOL.
10 FILLER PIC X(08)
VALUE '<symbol>'.
10 symbol pic X(12).
10 FILLER PIC X(09)
VALUE '</symbol>'.
.........
........
MOVE ''ÁBCDE' TO symbol...

The output will be
output file :<symbol>ABCDE </symbol>

Here the value ABCDE followed by 7 spaces is moved between the tags. Is there any way to supress the spaces.. ideally the output i require needs to be as below.
<symbol>ABCDE</symbol>.

Please share your ideas. thanks

Can you try STRING DELIMITED BY SPACE?

I assume you don't know the length of the non-blank content of your symbol.
In my example this content is stored in variable ws-symbol.
The output will be stored in ws-symbol-dynamic.
The field ws-count is for counting the non-blank characters in ws-symbol.

After executing this code the field ws-count contains 5 and the field ws-symbol-dynamic contains '<symbol>ABCDE</symbol>' padded at the right with 17 blanks.
This technique only works if your character string has no blanks imbedded.
If you want to handle this too, you might loop through your string from the end to the beginning tallying all blanks until you find a non-blank character. Then subtract the counter from the total field length. This will be then the value for ws-count and you can run the STRING statement from the above example again.
Hope that helps.

Stefan,

You dont need to know the lenth of non space data but delimited by space should suffice

Yep, you're right. I think it's time for me to RTFM again.

If you give your FILLERs names and go with what Pandora-Box has suggested, you should get what you want.