I have been trying to count the number of blank
characters there are in each string below:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

I pine for the old mainframe days when you could use various REXX functions (POS, WORDPOS) to count the # of words etc., in a string. [Oh, and the early Elton John albums were
awesome too!]

So far I have used CTRAN to translate the blanks' to '*', but I am stumped on how to accumulate the # of blanks in a string.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

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

DEFINE FILE CAR
INSTRLEN/D4 = ARGLEN(24, MODEL, 'D4');
OUTSTR/A24 = STRIP(24, MODEL, ' ', 'A24');
OUTSTRLEN/D4 = ARGLEN(24, OUTSTR, 'D4');
NBR_BLANKS/D4 = INSTRLEN - OUTSTRLEN;
END

TABLE FILE CAR
PRINT
MODEL
INSTRLEN

OUTSTR
OUTSTRLEN

NBR_BLANKS
END

I imagine you will see what the program is doing:

1) Determine the length of the string
2) Strip the blanks out of the string
3) Determine the length of the string without the blanks
4) Determine the number of blanks in the string by subtracting the length of the string without the blanks from the length of the string

Thanks very much!

Many Many years back. I had a simular situation where we needed to know how many times a certain character occurred in a field. We ended up creating our own userwritten subroutine. O the power of WebFOCUS/FOCUS.