Thank you Stephen and others for the suggestions. Most of systems I
work with does not allow extended ASCII characters, so CHAR(160) would
not work.
I have been submitting formatted text files to various federal and state
authorities for years. Some systems, such as EFTPS, are tolerant and
simple SFIL and SPUT functions work well. However, Social Security
Admin EFW2 and IRS FIRE systems require fixed length files (512 and 750
characters long) that are sparsely populated with actual data,
accompanied by great deal of blank spaces.
For blank spaces, I have been using CHAR(32) which worked fine up to
R:Base X Build: 10.0.1.20225. However, newer updates tend to trim the
CHAR(32) hard spaces and I had to keep one of computers at build
10.0.1.20225 for the purpose of creating these upload files. I just
tried CHAR(00) as suggested by Razzak and the null spaces seem to
stick. So, I am hopeful and will upload some test files.
Thanks again,
James
On 2/20/2018 9:04 AM, Stephen Markson wrote:
Hi James,
Can you insert CHAR(160) as the 512th character? This will keep the preceding
spaces and will show up as a blank. I don't know though whether the program
that takes the file as input will tolerate that.
Regards,
Stephen Markson
The Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada
416.979.2431 x251
-----Original Message-----
From: rbase-l@googlegroups.com [mailto:rbase-l@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
James W. Kim, CPA, MBA
Sent: February-19-18 4:26 PM
To: rbase-l@googlegroups.com
Subject: [RBASE-L] - Text file that retains trailing blank space
Need some help with creating text file that retains blank spaces at the end of
each row.
I often need to create text files with fixed row length such as 512 or
750 characters in a row. When there are no data value near the right end of
each row, the unused spaces need to be filled with blank spaces.
The following is an example of how such text file would be built. The example creates a
row that has "FLOOR 7" at 274th space in a row that has 512 characters. With
some previous versions of R:Base, the trailing spaces is retained after insertion of data
using SPUT function and line feed (CR/LF) would show up at 513th position.
However, the current version would remove the trailing space when data is
inserted using SPUT function and the (CR/LF) moves up to 281st position.
Is there anyway I can force the retention of trailing spaces so that CR/LF
always shows up at 513th position?
Thanks in advance,
James
-- create text variable with blank spaces SET VAR vRow TEXT = NULL SET VAR vRow
= (SFIL((CHAR(32)),512))
-- use SPUT function to fill in data
SET VAR vRow = (SPUT(.vRow, 'start', 1)) SET VAR vRow = (SPUT(.vRow, 'Floor 7',
274))
-- write the variable to a text file
OUTPUT sample.txt append
WRITE .vRow USING
'%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%'
OUTPUT SCREEN
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