Handling long strings in CHANGE
You can use the CHANGE command to specify “from” and “to”
strings up to 100 characters long. However, when you are dealing with
long strings, you might find that you cannot fit the whole CHANGE
command (including other parameters) on the Command line. To overcome
the problem, do one of the following to display an Extended Command
Entry pop-up panel (see Figure 1):
- Enter
CX
(for Change Extended) - Enter the CHANGE primary command (or one of its abbreviations, such as C) with no parameters.
The Extended Command Entry pop-up panel contains five lines (each
50 characters long) that you use to enter all the CHANGE command parameters
(but not the actual keyword CHANGE or any of its abbreviations).
File Manager treats the five lines on the pop-up panel as contiguous, allowing
you to specify long “from” and “to” strings
and any other parameters, using up to 250 characters in total.
Note: You
can continue a string (or any other parameter) from the last position
on one line of the pop-up panel to the first position of the next
line. However, this does not mean that you need to completely fill
a line before using the next line. For example, you can specify the “from”
string on the first of the five lines, the “to” string
on the next line, and the other parameters on the next line. If you
are not specifying a quoted string and you do not use all of a line,
File Manager treats the unused part of the line as a single space.
When you specify a string with quotation marks, any trailing blanks and any
leading blanks in the next line are retained.
Figure 1 shows the Extended Command
Entry pop-up panel for the CHANGE command. In this example, all occurrences
of the string “dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane” in field
#3 are to be changed to the string “trinitrophenylmethylnitramine”
for non-excluded records only.
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