Last week we were discussing about a piece of code that would remove special characters from a string. This was used in an SQR that writes to a .csv file.
This week we had a requirement for more than half a dozen of such SQRs.
It was part of converting some SQL queries into SQR so that they could be scheduled overnight.
So I went in for a function that would serve the purpose.
A procedure (function) that removes special characters from a string. Here is how to use it.
Do SPL-REMOVE (&descr, $descr)
Here, &descr is the input parameter and may contain any number of special characters.
The procedure returns the string without any special characters as $descr.
!Procedure for removing special characters from a string !Here we use the ideology that we have a finite set of !valid characters (alphanumeric) while the set of special !characters is fairly big. !***********************************************************************! ! Procedure: SPL-REMOVE ! Desc: Removes special characters from the source string - $srcstr. ! The output will be stored in the $outputstr ! To use this procedure use: Do SPL-REMOVE($Source, $outputstr) !***********************************************************************! BEGIN-PROCEDURE SPL-REMOVE($srcstr, :$outputstr) LET $valid_chars = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -.:/0123456789@()=+%*"£$' LET $invalid_chars = translate($srcstr, $valid_chars, '') LET #invalid = length($invalid_chars) IF #invalid LET $outputstr = translate($srcstr, $invalid_chars, '') ELSE LET $outputstr = $srcstr END-IF END-PROCEDURE !***********************************************************************! |
You can download the code here.
