Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Parsing a Character Field

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Parsing a Character Field

    Hi,

    I cannot get this - going brain dead.

    I have a field, Data,C,255.

    Data often contains:
    ___ Yes
    ___ No
    A long answer to a question up to 255 characters.

    If the field begins with (underlines) ____ I want to eliminate the underline, but keep the remaining up to 255 characters.

    I know there is a simple answer, I've been playing with Substr and ATC and getting nowhere.

    Thanks

    Tom

    #2
    RE: Parsing a Character Field

    Tom,

    You need a function to recursively check for the leading character being an underscore. Do you want to alter the original data or just to display the part of the field without the underscores?
    There can be only one.

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Parsing a Character Field

      This is sloppy and indicates how little I know about functions, but it will return the input string stripped of leading underscores.

      function remundrs as C(mystring as C)
      test = rtrim(mystring)
      ltest = len(test)
      while left(test,1) = "_"
      test = right(test,ltest-1)
      ltest = ltest -1
      end while
      remundrs = test
      end function
      There can be only one.

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Parsing a Character Field

        You can use REMSPECIAL to return just alphanumeric characters:

        REMSPECIAL(FIELD_NAME)

        If the value is ___abc, this will return abc

        Comment


          #5
          RE: Parsing a Character Field

          You could also do a STRTRN.

          STRTRN(FIELD,"_","")

          This should replace EVERY occurance of the underscore with a null.

          Tom

          Comment


            #6
            RE: Parsing a Character Field

            Thank YOu all,

            I'll give them all a try.

            I used:
            IF(*first(Qdata->Data,"_"),Word(Qdata->Data,2)+" "+Word(Qdata->Data,3)+" "+Word(Qdata->Data,4)+" "+Word(Qdata->Data,5)+" "+Word(Qdata->Data,6)+" "+Word(Qdata->Data,7) ,Qdata->Data)

            But it really isn't what I want.

            Bill - your option looks simpliest.
            Stan - I'm "going to school" on your suggestion.

            Again,

            Thank you all.

            Tom

            Comment


              #7
              RE: Parsing a Character Field

              OOops, Bill - your suggestion also removes spaces between words. This is a 255 Character field so lots of words.

              Tom Henkel's suggestion, works most of the time, but not all the time. I'll have to take a close look at the data it didn't like.

              Stan - I'm getting there.

              Tom

              Comment


                #8
                RE: Parsing a Character Field

                Prettied up a little with what I think I learned from Ira. There probably should be a test for the second parameter being longer than one character, as this would cause the function not to recognize any matches to remove.

                '************************************************
                function REMUNDRS as C(mystring as C,badchar as C)
                ' Pass a string or string field/variable (mystring parameter) to the function
                ' Pass the character to be removed from the string (badchar parameter) to the function
                ' The string without any leading "badchar"'s is returned

                ' Usage is remundrs(mystring,badchar)
                ' Example, where mystring = "*****five"
                ' remundrs(mystring,"*") will return "five"

                test = rtrim(mystring)
                ltest = len(test)-1
                while left(test,1) = badchar
                test = right(test,ltest)
                ltest = ltest -1
                end while
                remundrs = test

                END
                end function
                There can be only one.

                Comment


                  #9
                  RE: Parsing a Character Field

                  Now you've got me curious. What didn't work??

                  This is a standard Alpha5 function. It searches for the string you chose, then replaces every occurance of it with what you say.

                  Did you have some underscore characters you wanted to keep?

                  Tom

                  Comment


                    #10
                    RE: Parsing a Character Field

                    Hi again,

                    Tom - I just couldn't get your approach to work. The function I found was STRTRAN and it didn't work for me.

                    Stan - "You da man"
                    Your function works GREAT! Please put it in the Code Archive so everyone will see it.

                    Thank You very much

                    Tom

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X