On Fri, 9 Aug 2019 14:46:20 -0400, Steve Smith wrote: >Trying out Relson-style replying today: > It has been the classical recommendation for decades.
>>"...how can I append trailing blanks to a record in an existing file ..." >> >Adding blanks to the end of a VB line is admittedly onerous (yet I figured >it out in 2 minutes), ... > Don't keep me in suspense. What's the trick? >... but as no one ever needs to do that, it hardly matters. > Until it matters. It's a transgression for a designer to assume that an operation that "no one ever needs" (in the designer's opinion) should therefore be prohibited or made onerous. It should be intuitive: add blanks by positioning the cursor at the end of the line and pressing the spacebar. o I've had problems with a utility takes fixed-field key specifications and is happy with blanks but conscientiously reports an error for a record too short to contain the key. (Did someone here recently report such a problem with DFSORT?) o Classic uudecode pads short records (however foolishly) with NULs. I've needed to write a filter to repair stripped blanks. o Not with Edit but with ISPF Copy utility, I've copied a purely binary file and was dismayed to find trailing x'40' stripped. Long ago; it may be better nowadays. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
