Re: special characters issue in xml

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> Is there a way to retrive the decimal and/or hex value of a character?
>

That's easy to do with a data structure.  For example:

     D                 ds
     D  char                          1A
     D  num                           3U 0 overlay(char:1)

Then, set char to whatever you want to get the numeric value for.

     c                   eval      char = whatever

the numeric value of that character will be in the "num" variable as soon
as char is set.  For example, if you set CHAR to a blank, then NUM will
contain 64 (or hex 40, the EBCDIC value of a blank)


> Can we scan the text in a record and check for special characters like 
> , line feed, carriage return? I think decimal values 32 thru 126
> represent valid/most widely used characters.

32-126 would be the most common range in ASCII, but the iSeries is
primarily an EBCDIC machine.  Presumably, your iSeries data has already
been converted to EBCDIC?

I guess, unsurprisingly, I don't know much about your application and how
it works.   If you're reading a file that's still in ASCII, you need to
scan for the ASCII characters, if you're reading one that's in EBCDIC, you
scan for the EBCDIC equivalents.  The range of characters isn't so simple
when working with EBCDIC, but it's certainly doable.

> How can we retrieve the decimal value of the characters (dec value <32
>  and >126)? Is there a way to identify these special characters while
> reading a text record?

You can get the value using the DS I've shown above, so as long as you
know the numbers of the characters your scanning for, it's easy.  Just
loop through the "record" comparing each character to the ones you're
looking for.

> I need to take care of these special characters for an xml document upload.
> Since we replace & with a &amp; in xml document, all the special characters
> need to be converted to xml standard so that the xml parser can read the
> data.

That should be easy to do.

Personally, I'd keep the data in a stream file, and read it with automatic
conversion from the file's codepage (possibly ASCII) to the iSeries'
native codepage (probably EBCDIC) and then make your replacements in the
native codepage.   That way, if you need to deal with files that use
different codepages (or CCSID, or whatever) it'll happen automatically
simply by tagging the stream file with the correct codepage/ccsid.

Surely, the XML parser doesn't keep the data in an iSeries DB2
"record-based" file, but uses stream files, yes?

If you're not familiar with reading stream files in RPG, I've got a
tutorial on my web site here:

http://www.scottklement.com/rpg/ifs.html

Good Luck