On 2014-01-10 14:47, Charles Mills wrote:
I have a started task that (among many other things) will display its own
parameters, something like
Parm1=WIDGET
Parm2=FOOBAR
At present all of the values it displays are printable characters. Due to an
enhancement it is possible that one of the parameters will contain a
horizontal tab character. A C programmer would expect the display to become
Parm2=FOO\tBAR. MS Word would say FOO^tBAR. But those of you who are "real
mainframers through and through," how would you expect a tab to be
represented in a display? The value is going to be all printable characters
99% of the time so going to hex and character is probably a clumsy approach.
Parm2=FOO<tab>BAR
Parm2=FOO\tBAR
Parm2=FOO^tBAR
Or what?
Thanks,
Charles
It appears to me that you are mixing the display of parameter values
containing tab characters with the methods used to input tab characters
in various languages and tools.
A C programmer does not expect to see "\t" in a program's output. He/she
expects to see white space until the next tab stop. Similarly, the
author of a Word document expects the tab character to be represented as
white space until the next tab stop. In other words, a tab character
shouldn't "appear" in a display at all.
However, I understand that you are trying to display the inputs to the
program, presumably for diagnostic purposes. If you want to display the
parameter input exactly as provided by the user, then you might want to
show the parameters in dump format (both character and hexadecimal) and
not attempt to convert the tab character to some other representation.
--
Regards, Gord Tomlin
Action Software International
(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507
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