Differences in export function results

[Richard Kreiss]

Ran into an interesting problem the other day at a client's site.  There is
an export program which creates a csv file which had been running correctly,
that is until Tuesday.

Some of the data was being pushed right on position.

The export command used was export word.

Now there is a gotcha in this export.  There is an alphanumeric field which
has numbers 4 - 8 meaning a 4 foot section of shelf was changed to 8 foot.
The only way to get this out so that when it is read into Excel is to
"\""{40.  This exports the value correctly. Otherwise it treated this like a
date.

I tried to correct the right shift by using export ASCII to no avail.  This
made the situation worse.

I finally realized what was causing the shift.  If there was no value in
field 40, double quotes were exports and pushed values over to the right.

When the export word  was set to:

If: 40 = ""
Then:com(23)="";GOTO exp24
If: 40 ne ""
Then:com(23)="\""{40

This worked fine.

There are definite differences between the 2 functions.

export ascii shipdet =c:\shipdet r=\n f=, -x

export word shipdet=c:\shipdet

May not give the same results.


Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting
rkreiss at gccconsulting.net