Guardian Procedure Calls Reference Manual

the data element and the external field unless an RJ modifier is affecting the descriptor, in
which case the transferring of characters begins with the right character of each.
2. If w is less than the number of characters in the data element, the field overflow condition is
set.
3. If w is greater than the number of characters in the data element, the remaining characters in
the external field are filled with spaces (unless another fill character is specified by the FL
modifier).
It is not mandatory that the data element be of type character. For example, an INTEGER(16)
element containing the octal value %015536 corresponds to the ASCII characters "ESC" and "^",
which can be output to an ADM-2 terminal using an A2 descriptor to control a blinking field on
the screen. For example:
External FieldData ValueFormat
|WORD|'WORD'A
|WORD|'WORD'A4
|WOR| (overflow set)'WORD'A3
|ORD| (overflow set)'WORD'[RJ]A3
|WORD |'WORD'A5
| WORD|'WORD'[RJ]A5
|HI|%044111A
In the last example, the data value was stored in a two-byte INTEGER.
The "|" character is used to denote the boundaries of the output field.
On input, the operation of the Aw edit descriptor is as follows:
1. The number of characters specified by w, or the number of characters contained in the data
element specified by w, whichever is less, is moved from the external field to the data element.
The transfer begins at the left character of both the data element and the external field.
2. If w is less n, the data element is filled with (n-w) blanks on the right.
3. If w is greater than n, the leftmost n characters of the field are stored in the data element.
These examples illustrate these considerations:
Data Element ValueData Item LengthFormatExternal Field
'HELLO'5 charactersA5|HELLO|
'HEL'3 charactersA3|HELLO|
'HELLO '6 charactersA6|HELLO|
'HELLO '6 charactersA5|HELLO|
'HEL'3 charactersA5|HELLO|
The "|" character is used to denote the boundaries of the input field.
1556 Formatter Edit Descriptors