Re: Suppress leading zero of *DATE field

Thank you for your response Scott. I finally just "rolled my own" but here is the quote from the v6r1 ILE RPG Language Reference manual (chapter 10, page 228):

"The Y edit code is normally used to edit a 3- to 9-digit date field. It suppresses the leftmost zeros of date fields, up to but not including the digit preceding the first separator. Slashes are inserted to separate the day, month, and year."

Apparently this applies to a "numeric" date field and not a true date field, so I feel my confusion is at least somewhat justified.

Anyway, it's all good now.





"Scott Klement" <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:mailman.594.1312405549.2572.rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx...

hi TA,

I wonder if you are confusing two different things? There are two date related things you might be referring to...

1. The *DATE special field. This is a numeric field, provided by the RPG compiler, that always contains the job date. You might refer to this as "the *DATE field".

2. The date variable type. When you create a variable, you assign it a data type (A=Alpha, P=Packed, S=Zoned, etc) and there's a D=Date data type you can use. You might refer to a field defined this was as "a date field" (notice that I did _not_ say "a *date field")


Anyway, based on your text, I'm wondering if you're confusing the two things. Edit codes (such as Y) are only for numeric values -- so they will indeed work with *DATE, which is numeric. So if the reference manual says that Y works with *DATE, it's absolutely correct. (*DATE is _not_ a date field, it's a numeric field.)

If you want to format a date (data type) field, then it's easy enough to do... For example, you could do this:

myCharField = %char(myDateField:*USA)
// result = 08/02/2011

Or if you want to remove leading zeroes you could trim them:

myCharField = %triml(%char(myDateField:*USA):'0');
// result = 8/02/2011 or 10/02/2011

If you want to remove leading zeroes from any of the components of the date, you'd have to do it yourself (more or less) but it's not hard.

myCharField = %char(%subdt(myDateField:*MONTHS)) + '/'
+ %char(%subdt(myDateField:*DAYS)) + '/'
+ %char(%subdt(myDateField:*YEARS));

These examples are all in the USA format (MM/DD/YYYY), but they don't have to be... you can replace *USA with other formats, applicable to different environments.

Does this help, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

On 8/2/2011 4:32 PM, Timothy Adair wrote:

In the printer output specs of my program, I am attempting to suppress the
leading zero on a *DATE field. According to the RPG ILE manual (v6r1) I
should be able to do this with a "Y" edit code.

Unfortunately, the RPG compiler gives *RNF7059 (Editing is not valid with a
field that is not numeric; the Edit Code or Edit Word defaults to blanks).

Am I missing something obvious?