special characters in fixed width flat file

krisna · Post by **krisna** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 1:40 am

Hi All,

I am reading data from an oracle table and writing to a fixed length file.

DRS stage --> Transformer --> Sequential file

Properties for file,

Final Delimeter = end
Record Delimeter = UNIX newline
Delimeter = none
quote = none

job is executing successfully, the issue is with data. iam getting a special character instead of space.

Thanks in advance

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 1:42 am

Search DSXchange for APT_STRING_PADCHAR environment variable.

The character is not special, it's the value of that environment variable, by default 0x00 (the ASCII NUL byte).

krisna · Post by **krisna** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 4:10 am

Thank you very much, issue resolved.

IBM Analytics Champion 2009 - 2020 · Post by **asorrell** » Wed Sep 29, 2010 11:22 am

Side note - Be aware that it means you aren't padding your CHAR fields to their max length, instead DataStage is using $APT_STRING_PADCHAR to do so automatically. Changing it to a space "fixes" it in the database, but it can be dangerous if the reason the field was "short" is that it is missing some data.