Field Rule Foulup

[Roy Irby]

Could someone please check this out?

Simple table w/ 2 char fields, Clockin and Timein.

Clockin contains a string like this:

3/27/2003 17:15:00

I set Timein as a calculated field with this formula:

RIGHT(Clockin,AT(" ",Clockin,1)-1)

This -should- return 17:15:00.

When I enter recs, nothing appears in the Timein field.

In field rules, when I try to ^ v from the Timein field, I get the message:

Value of argument is out-of-range.

What gives?

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Roy, time to dig out the manual. I think you're missing the boat on the parameters passed to the Right() function.

This is explained in the Functions and Expressions Reference.

Try:

Right(clockin, 8) to retrieve the last (rightmost) 8 chars from the string, regardless of string length. But don't adopt it in your code without familiarizing yourself with the manual's explanation.

-- tom

[Roy Irby]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Holy Moly!

It sure is getting hard to keep the command syntax of different apps straight in my head!

So the right command works on the full width of the field, not the -contents- of the field (a la Excel, Approach, etc.).

My bad!

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Roy,

I don't think you're following.

Right() works on the full length of the string that's passed to it. If you pass a fieldname it works against the full width of the field, including trailing blank spaces. I understood your first message to mean you had zero trailing blanks.

If that's not the case, you will have to trim trailing blanks, before passing the contents of the field to the function.

If the Clockin field is 40 chars wide in table structure, and you put 20 chars of text in it, you'll have 20 blank spaces trailing the text.

Right(trim(clockin),8) ought to get it.

In DBF tables, blank spaces ARE part of the contents of each field. Remember, the DBF records are fixed length. This is how the length of each record is maintained. This would not be the case in other systems which use variable width records. In DBF tables it makes no sense to distinguish between 'contents' of a field, and blank spaces that are present in the field. The blanks are part of the field, and in the case of a char type field, the blanks are part of the string that you'll get if you put the field in a variable or expression.

-- tom

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Roy, in your first post you said:

---------------------------

Clockin contains a string like this:

3/27/2003 17:15:00

---------------------------


You can see now why I interpreted this to mean that 'clockin' contained nothing else... i.e. no trailing blanks. Otherwise, an Alpha Five (DBF) programmer would have said:

Clockin contains a string like this:

"03/27/2003 17:15:00              "

-- tom

[JerryBrightbill]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Roy

In this case, the substr() function makes more sense since you don't know how many trailing spaces you might have. Also, I would us the at() to find the colon and back up from there, just in case the spaces are in the wrong place. Then use alltrim to remove leading and trailing spaces.

alltrim(substr(clockin,at(":",clockin)-2))

Jerry

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

Jerry,

why use 3 functions, when 2 will do?

Right(trim(clockin),8)

-- tom

[Roy Irby]

RE: Field Rule Foulup

The 'location' of the space in the string will vary, but I'm fairly certain there will only ever be one embedded space in the field. The data is coming from a timeclock, so it's not likely to change formats. Good point tho.

Roy.