On Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:29:44 -0800 (PST), Lawrence Lustig wrote: >Although it would be nicely symetrical to have an >UNLOAD matching the LOAD, am I mistaken in thinking >you can do this in a single command already by >concatenating a bunch of LJS(CTXT(ColName)) >expressions in a SELECT statement?
Larry, It's often more complicated than that, because of the current expression size limit. I usually have to create a cursor loop, and build the long string that will be written to the next line of the file. My fantasy UNLOAD ... AS FORMATTED would also have an LRECL keyword, to automatically right-fill with spaces (CHAR(32)) to a certain logical record length, and a NOCRLF keyword, to not use carriage- return line feed at the end of a record, but continue immediately at the next byte with the next record. That could also help allow embedded CRLF's within the data to be loaded into a mainframe system without corrupting the data, or requiring character substitutions at both ends. After all, we want R:Base to prove itself against "the big boys," don't we? Bill
