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Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 10:39 am
by spracht
Substring operations can be performed using square brackets [start,length].
As a derivation for your stage var you could use:
stagevar=sourcecolumn[4,1].
For other interesting forms to use [] please refer to the documentation.
Regards
Stephan
Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 5:43 pm
by ray.wurlod
A substring based approach only works in bytes if a single-byte character set is in use. Since the OP is in the USA this is a fair, but by no means guaranteed, assumption.
All the substring functions actually work with characters which, in multi-byte character sets, is not the same thing as bytes. Stephan's answer gives you the fourth character from a string. There do exist functions such as BYTE, BYTELEN, BYTETYPE and so on for extracting and identifying specific bytes from a string in a multi-byte character set, but these are largely meaningless for all practical purposes.
Ray Wurlod
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