Guardian Programmer's Guide

Table Of Contents
Formatting and Manipulating Character Data
Guardian Programmer’s Guide 421922-014
19 - 3
Format-Directed Formatting
Formatting Output
Figure 19-1 shows the role of the FORMATCONVERT[X] and FORMATDATA[X]
procedures in formatting data for output according to a specified format.
Setting bit 15 of the flags parameter to zero specifies that the FORMATDATA[X]
procedure will perform output formatting. Setting bit 2 to zero specifies format-directed
formatting.
You provide the format as a series of edit descriptors in external form (as an ASCII
string) to the FORMATCONVERT[X] procedure. This procedure converts the edit
descriptors into an internal form understood by the FORMATDATA[X] procedure.
The list of data descriptors describes the data to be converted. Each data descriptor is
made up of an array that describes one data item or sequence of data items that
corresponds to one edit descriptor.
Figure 19-1. Format-Directed Formatting
VST094.VSD