hi, i am receiving a string which contains ASCII codes i want to convert them back to printable chars, is there any function in weFocus to do so?

thanks

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tamra,

Did you not try STRREP?

If you are trying to change a non-printable character to a printable one, you may want to use the HEXBYT function to set the unprintable character to a variable name.

If you are on Linux or Unix you can use the sed command as well.

Do you mean to say that your string contains hexadecimal pairs of numeric ASCII codes? Or decimal triplets perhaps?

You would have to start with splitting up the string into individual pairs (or triplets). The easiest approach is with -REPEAT ... WHILE ...
Within the loop you can decode the ASCII code to a character and concatenate it to a string.


An alternative approach is to us a TABLE request with an enumeration based on a COMPUTE with LAST. For that to work, you need to "generate" records into your source table so that the number of rows matches the number of ASCII codes in your input string. The usual approach to that is to JOIN the table against a sequence of the correct length - MacGyver does the trick.

For decoding the ASCII character, you'll have to cut a substring out of the input string based on that enumeration and the ASCII code length and then you can decode it.

Concatenate the result of the above to another field using LAST again. Finally, only retrieve the final record of that TABLE.

That gets complicated, doesn't it?


Or... you can perform the decoding in PASSTHRU SQL, using a recursive CTE if your RDBMS supports those.
In case you're using PostgreSQL, you could also use the convenient generate_series() function to create a table of sorts. Then you do the conversion per row per ASCII code and aggregate the whole thing together again with another function.

The approach here is actually quite similar to the FOCUS approach, but a little less difficult to implement.

Hi Masoud,

quote:

i am receiving a string which contains ASCII codes i want to convert them back to printable chars

Questions:
"receiving a string" - how? from where?
"ASCII codes" - what type of codes? control characters such as CR, LF? non-printing characters such as HEX A0?
"convert BACK - back to what?

With some answers we can go forward.