Saturday, August 11, 2007

The CHAR datatype

Ever wondered what would be the use of a char datatype when we already have datatypes like text and code. Well you'll see one very important use though which i came across i am not sure if there other other uses as well.

This happened on a project where i was required to create a export from navision in a format that did not have field level delimeters and i figured out that this was not possible using the dataport as it always added delimeters before and after a field so i had to create this text file which a carriage return after each line.

Carriage return as we know is a combination of two characters chr(13) and chr(10) i wished at that point i could use the chr command like in VB thatz when the char datatype came to rescue with this datatype you create a variable and assign it an ASCII integer value it automatically translates it back into a character and then FORMAT command can be used to concatenate it with your string operations

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