IBM Mainframe Forum

I have tried it with the period both before and after. My variable - YEAR - gets nothing with the dot before - as expected - and later calculations using YEAR fall over. With the dot after YEAR still gets my input preceded by 41 characters. Further, I cannot get the emulator back to where it was to rerun the tests. Accoding to the documentation a dot after the variable will take anything after the first delimiter (a space in the case of Pull Year .). As there is nothing after my 2314, apart from <enter> the dot gets nothing but I was still having the leading spaces as though they were part of my data entry which had been nothing more than 2, 0, 1 and 4 followed by <enter>. Even if I manually add spaces before the year I can no longer replicate the problem so I guess Hummingbird didn't actually put spaces there but some non-display characters.

Yes, they can't be spaces, as leading and trailing spaces are killed by PULL and friends. You could check that by trying to get the first WORD the YEAR. I think you'd get the whole thing back as your "word", leading stuff 'n' all.

Interestingly though, I used STRIP(year) which defaults to stripping leading and trailing blanks. This stripped whatever was the leading characters inferring they were blanks but Pull did not strip the leading characters. If I deliberately put leading characters Pull removes them. So Pull thought that they were not leading spaces but Strip did. Ho-Hum.

Anyway, cannot spend more time on this: last time I tried I was getting correct behaviour (and a not very satisfactory emulator setup) and I have real work to do now that I know when my Easter holidays are!