Weary from translating the works of Stephen King into Latin, Bob said:
 MQ>  My experience with this was with a variable defined in a TYPE
 MQ>  statement.  To verify my past results I wrote a NEW test program as
 MQ>  follows:
 MQ>  TYPE test
 MQ>     a as STRING * 10
 MQ>  END TYPE
 JG> Ok, this is what you will learn from this venture...  Strings are null
 JG> padded when defined in TYPE structures and the actual data length is
 JG> less than the defined length.
 JG> Hence, you now see why your rtrim$(variable) does not work, because
 JG> this function without additional parameters defaults to stripping a
 JG> space, ascii 32, and not a null, ascii 0.
 JG> Hence, rtrim$(variable, any chr$(0)+" ") takes BOTH into
 JG> consideration, and also bear in mind there is more than 1 way of
 JG> expressing this (see
 JG> other examples.)
    In this case, Quintin is correct, and you are not.  A
 fixed-length string variable, whether DIMmed or TYPEd, will
 always be that length and padded on the right with nulls.
 Therefore, while rtrim$ will strip the nulls out of a
 fixed-length string, if you place the results back into a
 fixed-length string, that will then be padded on the right
 with nulls.  So, the following code:
 dim c as string * 10
 c = "12345"
 print "[" + c + "]"
 c = rtrim$(c)
 print "[" + c + "]"
 c = rtrim$(c, chr$(0))
 print "[" + c + "]"
 b$ = rtrim$(c, chr$(0))
 print "[" + b$ + "]"
 ...produces the following screen output:
 [12345     ]
 [12345     ]
 [12345     ]
 [12345]
    The first line is the original contents of c, padded onm
 the right with nulls.  The second line is the contents of c
 after a regular rtrim$ using the default of only stripping
 spaces.  As you said, the nulls are still there.  The third
 line shows your error, in that, while rtrim$ did its job of
 stripping the nulls, PowerBASIC then put the resuling
 5-character string back into a 10-character-length
 fixed-length string, and padded it with nulls.  The fourth
 result is what you expected to happen, i.e., the result of
 rtrim$ was placed into a variable-length string, which
 doesn't put the nulls in.
... Is fearr go mall n  go br ch!
--- PPoint 1.96
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