PICSPEC

PICSPEC casts data from CHARACTER to PICTURE type.

x

Expression.

y

Picture specification.

The expression x must be CHARACTER NONVARYING with a length known at compile time.

y must be a character literal that specifies a valid PICTURE with an external representation that has the same length as the first argument.

The result has the PICTURE type specified by the second argument.

Unlike the EDIT built-in function, no conversion is done and no checks are made to see if the first argument holds data valid for the picture.

Like the UNSPEC built-in function, only the "type" of the data is changed.

So, for example given PICSPEC(x,'(5)9'), x must be CHAR(5) (since while the picture specification '(5)9' was 4 characters in length, its external representation requires 5 characters), but x will not be checked to see if it actually contains 5 numeric digits.

A statement of the N = N + PICSPEC(X,'(5)9') will not cause x to be converted from CHAR to PIC'(5)9', a conversion that would require a library call, but will cause the contents of x to be treated as if it were declared as PIC'(5)9'.