Equivalent of TRIM in Paragraph Language?

[initself]

What is the equivalent to TRIM(FOO,"|") in Paragraph language?

 

mb

[precisonline]

What exactly are you trying to do, trim leading and trailing vertical bars?

[initself]

Trim the first pipe from my string, since I concatenated my strings like this:

L.FOO = L.FOO : "|" : BAR

So my string will look like this:

"|x|y|z"

I want to remove the leading pipe.

[precisonline]

Will there only be one?  If that's the case, why not use [2,999999] (substring extraction)?

[initself]

Felt like 9999999 was ugly.

[precisonline]

It is.  But it's less ugly than the alternatives.

[CKilgore]

Why not use [2,LEN(FOO)-1]?  That way you don't have to worry about an upper limit to the size.

[precisonline]

Good question.  The difference is speed between a hard limit and a LEN() call is palpable.  Maybe for one call, no big deal, but if in a loop or used to process a whole bunch of records, 999999 will be recognizably faster than LEN().

The Reality platform used to (and might still) have the ability to do this:

variable[2,-1]

I always thought that was a Very Cool Thing because it makes it obvious that you want the end of the string.  The 99999 trick isn't really 100% obvious, and it inevitably ends up creating a bug, like the 999 character limit on the @PARAM variable in SB+.

[initself]

The 99999 trick isn't really 100% obvious, and it inevitably ends up creating a bug, like the 999 character limit on the @PARAM variable in SB+.

What a horrible thing to have to commit to memory.

[precisonline]

Tell me about it.  How sick am I?