filePro quiz -- edits "@"

[Mike Schwartz]

> On 8/22/2011 10:53 AM, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> > Here's a quickie.  No fair looking at the list's archives for examples
from me.
> >
> > What does the "@" edits syntax do?
> >
> > Bonus points: write an edit that needs it.
> 
> No takers?
> 
> The "@" edits syntax matches end-of-field (including trailing spaces).
It's

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     I left it to somebody else to answer, because in May you gave us a
prime example of how to use the @ in this "urlenc", and I wanted to see if
anybody else had saved it:  

>> Without the @, the "accept any amount of any character" part of the edit 
>> will accept all of the trailing spaces. Because the "&39;" expansion 
>> has increased the number characters in the field, the result no 
>> longer fits. By adding the "@" (which must come before the "*"), all 
>> of the trailing spaces are consumed, and are not part of the 
>> resulting value. Therefore, unless the expanded value is too long to 
>> fit, the edit "works". (Consider the case of a field consisting of 
>> nothing but apostrophes.) However, using
>> DOEDIT() and passing an explicit length, can work around this.
>
> But you're still not going to get any indication that you may have 
> tried to expand off the end of the destination field, as you could 
> with a 'function', right?

If the result doesn't pass the destination field's edit, the assignment
fails and the destination is blanked.  (I believe that, long ago, this was a
fatal error.)  This is true whether it's simply an assignment to a field
with an edit, or the result of the DOEDIT() function.

So, these both result in field "yy" being blank:

     xx(50,*) = "Something that fails the 'foo' edit"
     yy(50,foo) = xx
and
     xx(50,*) = "Something that fails the 'foo' edit"
     yy(50,*) = doedit(xx,"foo")

But, there is a difference between these two:

     xx(10,*) = "''''''''''"
     yy(40,*) = doedit(xx,"urlenc")       '' Fails (yy is blanked)
and
     xx(10,*) = "''''''''''"
     yy(40,*) = doedit(xx,"urlenc","40")  '' Succeeds

Ken Brody
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