HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
STRIP
Used to delete any specified character in the field.
Syntax
{TRAILING}
STRIP{LEADING } "characters"
{ALL }
Parameters
TRAILING If TRAILING is specified, all occurrences of each
character at the end of the field are replaced with
blanks.
LEADING STRIP LEADING replaces with blanks all occurrences of
each character at the beginning of the field.
ALL STRIP ALL deletes all occurrences of each character,
compressing the data to the left.
characters Any string of one or more characters can be specified.
Since the statement does not apply to leading or
trailing blanks, the statements STRIP LEADING " " or
STRIP TRAILING " " are not useful.
Discussion
The STRIP statement can be used to format data entered into or moved to
any field. (For automatic formatting, refer to the SET command earlier
in this section.) As is true of all formatting statements, STRIP has an
immediate effect on the data in the memory buffer; the formatted data is
then available for display or copying into the application. When the
user enters data into a field for which formatting is specified, the data
is formatted as soon as ENTER or an appropriate function key is pressed.
Thus, FORMSPEC formatting is done before data is written to the data or
batch file. (In contrast, reformatting through REFORMAT, described in
Section 5, is done after data is collected, edited, and written to the
batch file.)
Note that only the characters between the leftmost nonblank and the
rightmost nonblank characters are affected. That is, leading and
trailing blanks are not included when the data is formatted. No
formatting occurs when the field is blank since there are no characters
to strip.
Example
Statement Data Entered After Formatting
STRIP ALL "-" [548-72-2002] [548722002 ]
STRIP LEADING "0" [ 000205000] [ 205000]