Basically, any printable character is any character with a recognized value in your selected character set and excludes the control characters X'00'- X'1F' (in UTF-8, ASCII, and all EBCDIC code pages). Bell, Carriage Return, Line Feed, Vertical Tab, Page Feed are some assigned printer control characters that would be included in a constant or variable for a print statement.
On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 4:03 PM Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote: > > It's true, "non-printable" begs the question of "what printer?" I have seen > character sets that included little 2-character "hex" glyphs that could > therefore "print" or represent any byte value. I work mostly in C++ so I tend > to think in terms of the C library. The standard C library has a Boolean > function isprint(). I just looked up the spec for that function and it is so > self-referential as to be useless: Test for a printable character including > space, as defined in the print locale source file and in the print class of > the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale. (i.e., printable means > printable). And I just looked up the Microsoft definition and it is even more > convoluted and effectively useless. Still, I think "printable character" is > useful: I think most people have a good general idea of what it means. But > granted it is not so precise as, say, alphanumeric. > > Charles > > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On > Behalf Of Tom Marchant > Sent: Wednesday, December 4, 2019 10:52 AM > To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Subject: Re: Misuse of the word hexadecimnal (Was RE: COPYING PDS TO PDS ...) > > On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 10:01:36 -0800, Charles Mills wrote: > > >"Non-printable" (or sometimes non-alphanumeric/national) is the > >word people are looking for. > > I disagree. "non-printable" is a term that has little meaning. > Even if you mean "non-printable using a TN print train", for > example, that is only a subset of the 256 possible values in a > byte. > > The point of using a term like "any hexadecimal character" is to > indicate that all 256 possible values in the byte are acceptable. > It could just as well be "a byte with any hexadecimal value", or "a > byte with any binary value". > > -- > Tom Marchant > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
