suppress INPUT delimiter

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1

I’m at home so don’t have the code snippet.

I want to use INPUT to read a JCL card. The input is free-text. A comment, which sometimes includes a COMMA. English text. No matter what I try, I can’t suppress the delimiter to become nothing. I tried ID=’ ‘, which actually makes the delimiter a space, which makes it worse. ID=’’ won’t compile. It forces me to use a delimiter, and I don’t want one!

Here is says making ID = blank will disable it, but it doesn’t work:

http://silk.nih.gov/dbtek/viewdoc?vdsn=VPOD.D3866649.C040729.PDF

I tried
IM=D and IM=F with various combinations, with no luck.

It is obviously running in batch with JCL.

Thanks!

2

Have you tried setting the NATPARM to IM=F before you start Natural ?

3

You could try ID=H’FF’ or some other character that would never show up in JCL.

4

SET GLOBALS ID=H’FF’ won’t compile. It seems to want a printable keyboard character.

5

DEFINE DATA LOCAL
1 #A (A1) INIT <H’B2’>
1 #PARM (A80)
END-DEFINE
FORMAT LS=81
SET GLOBALS ID=#A
INPUT #PARM
WRITE #PARM
END

It looks like you have to use a displayable character for ID= but you can improve your chances of it working by using a character that is unlikely to have been used.
You cannot use any hex character like FF otherwise you get
NAT1115 Invalid alphabetic value for SET GLOBALS statement.

6

The hex assignment works under Natural 8.3 under Windows. I expect it to work under 8.x on the mainframe.