$Lstr Left

Leftmost characters of a longstring

Note: Many $functions have been deprecated in favor of Object Oriented methods. The OO equivalent for the $Lstr_Left function is the Left function.

This function takes a string or longstring input and produces the leftmost characters of the input, possibly padded to an indicated length.

The $Lstr_Left function accepts three arguments and returns a string result.

The first argument is an arbitrary string or longstring. This is a required argument.

The second argument is a number between 1 and 2**31-1 that indicates the result length. This is a required argument.

The third argument is a string containing a single character to be used as the pad character if the result length is longer than the string specified by argument one. This is an optional argument and defaults to a blank.

Syntax

%result = $Lstr_Left(longstring, len, pad)

%result is the leftmost characters of the input longstring, padded with the pad character if necessary.

Usage notes

• $Lstr_Left acts very much like $PADR except
  • The target length and pad character arguments are reversed.
  • It cancels the request if the result target is too short to hold the result.
  • It cancels the request if the pad character argument is longer than one byte.
  • It can operate on LONGSTRING inputs.
  • It produces a LONGSTRING output.

Examples

1. To set %BIG to "Vol":

   %BIG = $Lstr_Left('Voldemort', 3)

2. To set %BIG to "Snape" followed by 295 exclamation marks:

   %BIG = $Lstr_Left('Snape', 300, '!')

Products authorizing $Lstr_Left

• Sirius functions
• Fast/Unload User Language Interface
• Janus Open Client
• Janus Open Server
• Janus Sockets
• Janus Web Server
• Japanese functions
• Sir2000 Field Migration Facility