I've come across 2 instances where OI 8.0.1 seems to be working incorrectly unless I'm doing something wrong, as follows:

Instance 1 … substring extraction.

e.g. TXT=ALPHA-1,lth … where lth is a positive number; I'd like to extract the ending characters from APHA. In this case, if lth contains 3, only the last character is being extracted. If lth is negative, the correct (inverted) substring is extracted.

Instance 2 … program aborting on successive XLATEs

e.g. TXT1=XLATE("FILE1", "ABC", "FIELD1", "X")

    TXT2=XLATE("FILE1", "ABC", "FIELD2", "X")

    TXT3=XLATE("FILE1", "ABC", "FIELD3", "X")

I'm trying to obtain several fields from the same record successively and each field contains multi-values (say, about 100 values in each field). Program is aborting. When issuing a READ statement for this record and then extracting each field, program works ok, meaning that the record is not corrupt. I've also run an LH_VERIFY on the file's DICT and INDEX and they are ok. Why should this be happening?

Any comments or verification of these 2 presumable bugs would be appreciated.

-3, 3

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Thanks, but has it always been like this?

Yes :)

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As Sprezz sez, Yep,as far back as Revelation.

If a=123456'

then -1,3 would return 6 (return 3 characters starting at the last position in the string)

-3,3 would return 456 (return 3 characters starting from the 3rd character from the end of the string)

-1,-3 returns 654

-3,-3 returns 432

As far as your XLATES go why not just read the entire record into a variable e.g. myrecord=XLATE(myfile,'RECID','','X') and then do field extracts (myrecord)?

Thanks Warren, I ahd already done that. But it still intrigues me why successive XLATE's should now be acting strangely.

I have no idea. Maybe @DICT, @RECORD or @ID are getting stepped on. If it were ARev I would suspect that you're running out of stack or string space.

Sprezzatura knows more about the internals of OI and ARev than I ever will. Perhaps they have some ideas.

Sorry Warren but not enough info to go on :). Xlate/CalculateX don't use system variables per se so it must be something else. When you say "abort" David are there any messages?

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No, program simply stops working. As I said, I got around this by reading the whole record and then selecting each field I wanted … performance is also better, naturally.

But still, I had never come across this anomaly before. And any hints would be welcome.

If you add to a log file at each line of the program with status() and @File.Error what do you see?

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