APPEND

The purpose of the APPEND statement is to join together the contents of two fields or character strings. Specifically, APPEND attaches the contents of a second, or source, field to the end of the current contents of the first, or destination, field, optionally inserting one or more blanks between the fields.

    ••••• APPEND   ••• •••••••••••••••••••••• ••• •  ••• •••••••••••••••••••••• •••
    (1)            (2) (3)                    (4)(5) (6) (7)                    (8)

Using the Statement

The destination field must be an alpha field. The source field can be either alpha or constant.

The length of the destination field is determined by finding the last nonblank character in the field. Then, the number of spaces specified in the statement is added to the end of the destination field.

Spaces are added until the specified number of spaces has been added or the end of the destination field has been reached, whichever comes first. Then, the characters of the source field are copied and appended after the inserted spaces. Characters are copied from the source field to the destination field until the last nonblank character of the source field has been copied (or the end of the destination field has been reached).

Restrictions

The justification-type and the pad character are ignored. The characters copied are stored left justified in the destination field after the specified amount of blanks is added. No padding is performed, even if the source field is shorter than the space remaining in the destination field. No other templating takes place.

Related Statements

SET, SET TEMP

Examples

The following example shows how to set a field to a constant that is longer than 22 characters:

          SET      TGL WORK COLUMN HEADING        =      Total Customer-Related
          APPEND   TGL WORK COLUMN HEADING        1      Sales

This pair of statements generates a column heading, “Total Customer-Related Sales.”

The next example shows how you can use APPEND to generate a message from a number of “pieces”, depending on conditional checks:

          SET      TGL WORK MESSAGE FIELD         =      PLEASE
          IF       --- ERRORS                     GE     1
    T     APPEND   TGL WORK MESSAGE FIELD         1      RE-ENTER CUSTOMER ID
    F     APPEND   TGL WORK MESSAGE FIELD         1      CONTINUE DATA ENTRY

The following is another example that properly formats line three of a customer’s address:

          SET      TAR WORK ADDRESS           003 =  TAR CUSTOMER CITY
          APPEND   TAR WORK ADDRESS           003 0      ,
          APPEND   TAR WORK ADDRESS           003 1  TAR CUSTOMER STATE
          APPEND   TAR WORK ADDRESS           003 2  TAR CUSTOMER ZIP CODE