6. Character Data – ILE RPG in Easy Bytes

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ILE RPG in Easy Bytes

In Unit 6, you learn how to process, manipulate, combine, and inspect character-based information by using expressions. You’ll become familiar with the rich set of built-in functions that ILE RPG uses with character data. In addition, you learn how to convert numeric data to character data so that you can use numeric data with character processing.

This course is a unit of the ILE RPG in Easy Bytes  series, a complete introductory ILE RPG programming self-guided tutorial.

 

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Processing Character Data

Simple Character Assignment

But character data also plays a large part in many applications. We’ve already used the Eval (Evaluate expression) operation to evaluate arithmetic expressions. Now let’s look at how to assign values to character fields.
Concatenating Character Values

These operations also provide a flexible and powerful method for joining character values together; this process is called concatenation. Use the + operator to concatenate two or more character values—which can be variables, literals or constants—and assign the resulting new character value to a variable. A single concatenation expression can contain as many + operators and character operands as needed to accomplish a desired concatenation.
Using Built-in Functions with Character Data

ILE RPG also supports many built-in functions that you can use along with character expressions. These provide new functions that aren’t available by coding simple concatenation. Most of the built-in functions that return character values return variable-length character values.
Legacy Code (Character Data)

Move is a fixed-format operation code (not allowed in free-format RPG) that’s prevalent in legacy code. Move assigns characters from Factor 2 to the Result field: *..