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Posted by: Ringer
CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
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Published: 17 Jan 2013
Revised: 23 Jan 2013 - 3969 days ago
Last viewed on: 04 Dec 2023 (4978 views) 

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CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields Published by: Ringer on 17 Jan 2013 view comments(6)

I was wondering clearing a record format in RPG would set the VARYING character field lengths to zeros. Yep, it sure did, which is nice. FYI for anyone else. I don't see this behavior documented in the RPG reference PDF.

Chris Ringer

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Posted by: bobcozzi
Site Admin ****
Chicagoland
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 18 days 18 hours 55 minutes ago

Of course it would. by definition an "empty" VARYING field is '' (zero length).

So CLEAR myVARFld would set its length to 0 and may even clear out the existing data.

FYI, I normally do this:

 myVarField = '';

Because that's often more clear to others.

Posted by: Ringer
Premium member *
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 18 days 18 hours 32 minutes ago

I presumed it would but had to check anyway. You know, Murphy's Law.

Posted by: bobcozzi
Site Admin ****
Chicagoland
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 18 days 17 hours 50 minutes ago

Note the following regarding VARLEN/VARYING fields:

Increasing the length causes RPG to clear out the new locations before moving in the new data. So if a 50-byte VARYING field is currently 10 bytes long, and you move a 20 position value into it, positions 11 through 20 are cleared before the move is performed.

If you then move an 8 position value into that same field (which now has a "current length" of 20) the compiler simply moves the data into the field, left-justified and changes the current length to 8. This leaves the old data in position 9 to 20 and is what causes VARYING to perform better than fixed-length fields.

 

Posted by: Ringer
Premium member *
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 18 days 28 minutes ago

Thanks for the confirmation Bob.

Posted by: DaleB
Premium member *
Reading, PA
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 17 days 22 hours 37 minutes ago

Never thought about the performance aspect of VARYING vs. fixed; will have to keep that in mind. For the record, I've always explicitly zeroed the length:

 %LEN(myVarField) = 0;

Sounds like I should switch to CLEAR, which does exactly the same thing with less typing. Wink

Posted by: DaleB
Premium member *
Reading, PA
Comment on: CLEAR RECFMT and VARLEN fields
Posted: 10 years 10 months 13 days 2 hours 27 minutes ago

"I don't see this behavior documented in the RPG reference PDF."

Actually, it is documented. In Ch. 22 (Op Codes), CLEAR says it sets elements in a structure or a variable to their default initialization value depending on field type. In Ch. 9 (Data Types and Data Formats), Character Data Type, Variable-Length Character..., it says, "A variable-length field is initialized by default to have a current length of zero." QED