Re: Testing for first non-blank character

["Roger Pence" <rp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Does anybody have a brilliant little piece of RPGIII code to test for the
> first non-blank character in a right-justified (sorry, JDE stuff)
character
> field so that I can substring from that position to the end of the field?
I
> really don't want to use a data structure and test each character if I
don't
> have to... I have my pride <g>.

Many years ago, Julian Monypenny showed me this clever technique. It uses
two moves to continually shift off each left most position of the source
string. The key to the technique is to have a work field 1 byte shorter than
the string you're parsing.  Julian benchmarked this against several other
methods and this one was wayyyy faster. Sorry for the pseudo code, but
you'll get the idea.

Const srcStrLen = 60
srcStr LEN( srcStrLen )
tgtStr  LEN( srcStrLen - 1 )
tstStr  LEN( 1 )

for x = 1 to srcStrLen
    * move leftmost char of source string to work value
    MoveL srcStr to tstStr
    * test it for blanks
    if tstStr = *BLANK
        do something
        * if you choose to break out of the loop here, x = position of first
blank character in source string
    endif
    * next two lines shift off current leading character of source string
    movel srcStr tgtStr
    move tgtStr  srcStr
next x

rp

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