[SOLVED] Range Of Letters Using A Like Operator In An If Statement

Hey there,

When I use a like character mask in a filter I can put a range of numbers or letters that I want the mask to look for in a specific position of a string.

Example:
WHERE SLOT LIKE '%[a-z]';

The above will return anything that ends in a letter "a" through "z", but when I try using a range in an if statement it throws an error.

Example:
IF EDIT(SLOT, '$$$$$$9') EQ ' ' OR EDIT(SLOT, '$$$$$9$') LIKE '[a-z]' THEN SLOT ELSE NewSlot

Rather than checking if the character is "a" through "z" like it would in a filter it's checking if the character is literally like "[a-z]".

I assume this means the functionality just isn't there, but I was wondering if anyone knew a way to get this to work, or if my syntax is just wrong.

Thanks!

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

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Posts: 56 | Location: UT | Registered: December 01, 2015

Dave

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You're using regular expressions al WHERE statement. Although supported by various RDBM systems, it's not standard SQL.

Webfocus does however have a function called:
PATTERN

quote:

The PATTERN function examines a source string and produces a pattern that indicates the sequence of numbers, uppercase letters, and lowercase letters in the source string. This function is useful for examining data to make sure that it follows a standard pattern.

In the output pattern:

Any character from the input that represents a single-byte digit becomes the character 9.

Any character that represents an uppercase letter becomes A, and any character that represents a lowercase letter becomes a. For European NLS mode (Western Europe, Central Europe), A and a are extended to apply to accented alphabets.

For Japanese, double-byte characters and Hankaku-katakana become C (uppercase). Note that double-byte includes Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, full-width alphabets, full-width numbers, and full-width symbols. This means that all double-byte letters such as Chinese and Korean are also represented as C.

Special characters remain unchanged.

An unprintable character becomes the character X.