Progress
Language Reference
STRING Function
Converts a value of any data type into a character value.
SYNTAX
source
An expression of any data type that you want to convert to a character value.
format
The format you want to use for the new character value. This format must be appropriate to the data type of source. If you do not use this argument, Progress uses EXPORT format. This is useful if you want to produce left-justified numbers. See the Progress Programming Handbook for information on data formats.
EXAMPLEIn the example procedure, the TIME function returns the number of seconds since midnight. The first DISPLAY statement in this procedure uses the STRING function to convert that value into hours and minutes. TIME is the value and “HH:MM AM” is the format used to display the result of the STRING function.
The second DISPLAY statement displays some customer information. It uses the concatenation (+) operator to join together the values of the city, state, and postal-code fields. If these fields were not joined together, the spacing would be different for each customer address depending on the length of the city name.
When you concatenate character fields, Progress creates a new character field, at least for the duration of the procedure. The default display format for character expressions such as that resulting from the concatenation is x(8). This means that Progress allows only 8 spaces for displaying the concatenation of the city, state, and postal-code fields. The FORMAT x(22) option overrides that default x(8) format, telling Progress to set aside 22 spaces for displaying the concatenation of the city, state, and postal-code fields.
NOTES
- The STRING function is double-byte enabled. The source argument can contain double-byte data.
- If source is an integer and format begins HH:MM or HH:MM:SS, STRING formats the source as a time. If the hour is greater than or equal to 12 and there is an A or an a in format, STRING subtracts 12 from the hour and converts the A or the a to a P or p (for A.M. and P.M.). The hour 0 is treated as 12 a.m., and noon is treated as 12 p.m. If you use AM/PM format, HH is replaced by a leading blank and a digit if the hour is between 0 and 9.
If seconds (SS) are not in the format, then the time is truncated to hours and minutes.
- If source is a RAW value, you must specify an appropriate format to return the character string representation.
SEE ALSO
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