string manipulation question

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Kenneth Brody done said:
> > Okay, so if you don't do a trim of the spaces, any trailing space might
> > overflow the field length, thus failing the edit?
> 
> Correct.  (However, see below.)

Then your edit solution for Bob, while elegant, would be subject to failure
if the expansions cause the data to overflow--while a processing-oriented
soliution would allow the opportunity to trim to the correct length if
necessary.

> "What happened when you tried it?"  :-)

Heh...it was John, Tony, and me in the fP Room, all three of us trying to
figure out why it would fail.

Incidentally--the @ in your edit is not officially documented in the
online help.  I checked a 5.0.6 and a 5.0.10, Tony checked 5.0.14.  The
-only- place I could find it was on a system that had Laura's help files
installed.

> Second question to ponder:
> 
> Given this edit:
> 
> monexp   monexp1 | monexp2 | monexp3
> monexp1  "Jan"<uary> | "Feb"<ruary> | "Mar"<ch> | "Apr"<il> | "May" | "Jun"<e>
> monexp2  "Jul"<y> | "Aug"<ust> | "Sep"<tember> | "Oct"<ober> | "Nov"<ember>
> monexp3  "Dec"<ember>
> 
> Why does this not fail, even though we are not stripping trailing spaces?

Because it never gets past syntax check?  You didn't quote any of the
"should be there" sections as string literals, so I'm assuming the edit
editor will puke on this to begin with.  :)

(SWAG...I think you're trying to trick us!)  :)

mark->
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