DSXchange

Hi all,

I have following job design

FF ---> Transformer ---> Transformer2 ---> FF2

FF - Fixed Length, All columns are characters
Transformer -> converts Characters to Varchar

Transformer2--> Uses Stage variable (svLength)

svLength=Len(Trim(Input.Col1[1,8]))

However svLength always gives me 8, even for empty strings.

Any solutions

Well obviously your string is not empty.

If it was originally a char field, it is possible that it has been padded. Though I would have thought that if the input is fixed that it should be spaces.
What is your default pad string? Is it 0x0?

Any idea how to remove this pad string. ??

No, not before we know what the padded values are.

How are you converting from CHAR to VARCHAR in the transform stage?

You can use the STR() function to see what a given character is, so in your case make a debug output from your transform, output STR(In.Col[8]) and see if it is indeed 0x0 or some other value.

Actually reviewing your original post - I would have assumed that the input should have been padded with spaces from the fixed width file.

Do you know what your current pad string is?

Anyway - there is a environment variable APT_STRING_PADCHAR or something similar. Here you can set the value you wish to use to pad your values.

Hi All,

Thanks for your replies,

my pad string is 0x20. If I am not wrong this means space.

I changed my trim function as follows and with surprise it worked.
Can anyone explain me why ???

Have you checked your source to see which character is present there, if any? If it were 0x0 then no padding would be performed .

If you are sure that it is space then you can use Convert function in transformer to convert space to nothing.

I don't remember the syntax. But it is somewhat like below:
The above function can be wrong. But, I am sure there is Convert function in transformer