RE: Scan for a character less than X'40

John,

Try using the TRANSLATE built in function in SQL. Enumerate all the possible characters below x'40' translated to x'40'. Compare the text after TRANSLATE against the original text to locate the text with invalid characters. Update that original text after passing it through TRANSLATE to remove those invalid characters.

Paul Morgan

Principal Programmer Analyst
IT Supply Chain/Replenishment

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John McKee
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:25 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Scan for a character less than X'40

Is there a way to scan a text field in a file for an embedded character less than an EBCDIC blank? We retrieve text from vendors and post this to accounts. I am going to modify the code to convert incoming characters less than a space to a space. But, that doesn't address the potential of other embedded characters already in the file. I can see how to write an RPG program that would check each character, but wondered if SQL could be used - just to see if any others are present. After more than three years of doing this, we got hit with TWO x'15' embedded characters. I did not realize that characters less than x'40' were not allowed. Receiving CPF5192 has taught be otherwise. I just was looking for a (relatively) quick way to determine if other invalid characters have been written to the file and those accounts just have not been displayed yet.

I thought about using query, but I am not looking for a specific character - just one less than x'40 if it exists at all.

John McKee