Edit Words

If you have editing requirements that cannot be met by using the edit codes described above, you can use an edit word. An edit word is a character literal or a named constant specified in positions 53 - 80 of the output specification. It describes the editing pattern for an numeric and allows you to directly specify:

• Blank spaces
• Commas and decimal points, and their position
• Suppression of unwanted zeros
• Leading asterisks
• The currency symbol, and its position
• Addition of constant characters
• Output of the negative sign, or CR, as a negative indicator.

The edit word is used as a template, which the system applies to the source data to produce the output.

The edit word may be specified directly on an output specification or may be specified as a named constant with a named constant name appearing in the edit word field of the output specification. You can obtain the edited value of the field in calulation specifications using the built-in function %EDITW (edit word).

Edit words are limited to 115 characters.