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misi01 · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 7:51 am Post subject: Problem with CHANGE command

This seems really stupid, but I'm obviously missing something somewhere.

I have a simple sequential file with 81 characters in it. The first 4 are garbage that I want to remove. I've tried everything (?) but keep on failing on the actual change command. The data looks like this

Terry_Heinze · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 8:22 am Post subject:

Those 1st 4 bytes look like the RDW of a variable length record. X'0051' = decimal 81 and X'0300' = decimal 768. I don't think the RDW of a varible length record is available for editing. If you want to remove it, I think you'll need to copy this VB file to an FB one. It would help if you had done a "col" in your editing session to make it easier for us to see the exact columns.
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....Terry

William Collins · Supermod Joined: 03 Jun 2012 Posts: 437 Topics: 0

That first lump of characters are being treated as a "word" contiguous with what you want to remove. The "word" will be shifted left/right if the replacement is shorter/longer and will leave the next "word" alone, unless the change makes the first word long enough such that it would otherwise "crash" into the second word, when the second word will be shifted right with one space between the two words.

If you just want to chop off the first four bytes of a line/block try (4/((4 in the line command area. You will receive the four blanks at finishing at the end of the bounds.

misi01 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 6:30 am Post subject:

Terry - they're actually the outgoing result from an IMS transaction, so the length would be the length of the trans. The file is already FB (91 bytes). Sorry that I can't seem to upload an attachment showing the layout, but the first X is in column 5

William - I should have mentioned that I'm trying to remove those 4 bytes via an edit macro (which is when I started seeing the "problem"). To my knowledge, you can't (?) do a (4 as a prefix command in a macro
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Michael

misi01 · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 6:45 am Post subject:

Quick append to the previous one. After googling, I found the following command (no idea it existed)

kolusu · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 10:38 am Post subject: