IBM Mainframe Forum

I work in a VM/ESA environment, with PL/I code.
I need to determine if a character in a string is a control character. In other words, if the ascii value of any character in a string is <32 or >126, consider it invalid.
Is there anything comparable to a builtin ascii function that does this conversion, like some languages will have an ASC() or ASCII() function?

Thank you in advance for any help

Hello and welcome to the forum,

What you describe is 7-bit ascii and i know of nothing on an ibm mainframe that uses 7-bit ascii. Actually, all of the windows and unix things i work with use 8-bit ascii also. . .

What are you dealing with that still uses 7-bit ascii?

To do what you want, you could check for characters that are < x'20' or > x'7F'. That shouldn't require any special function.