Using Masked Character Codes. Most of the character masking codes extract certain classes of characters from a string. Alphabetic, nonalphabetic, numeric, or nonnumeric characters can be extracted. Spaces are treated as non-alphanumeric characters. Other MC codes convert uppercase data to lowercase and vice versa.
Code |
Description |
MCA |
Extracts all alphabetic characters, both uppercase and lowercase. Nonalphabetic characters, including spaces, are not printed. |
MC/A |
Extracts all nonalphabetic characters, including spaces. Alphabetic characters are not printed. |
MCL |
Converts all uppercase letters to lowercase. Does not affect lowercase letters or nonalphabetic characters. |
MCN |
Extracts all numeric characters. Nonnumeric characters, including spaces, are not printed. |
MC/N |
Extracts all nonnumeric characters, including spaces. Numeric characters are not printed. |
MCP |
Converts non-printable characters to dots and drops the high-order bit of all characters above character 127. |
MCT |
Converts the first character of each word to uppercase and all other characters to lowercase. Does not affect nonalphabetic characters. A word begins after any nonalphabetic character except a single or double quote. |
MCU |
Converts all lowercase letters to uppercase. Does not affect uppercase letters or nonalphabetic characters. NOTE- When performing an oconv (,'MCU') on a string that contains an attribute mark, only the portion of the string prior to the attribute mark is converted. |
The table below contains examples of these codes. A space is represented by a à.
Data |
Code |
Output |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MCA |
BostonMA |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MC/A |
*,ààà02134 |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MCL |
boston,àmaàà02134 |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MCN |
02134 |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MC/N |
Boston,àMAàà |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MCT |
*Boston,àMaàà02134 |
*Boston,àMAàà02134 |
MCU |
*Boston,MAà02134’,’MCU |
See Also