Writing NULL to a file

PhilHibbs · Post by **PhilHibbs** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 3:35 am

The documentation says that @NULL is represented externally as CHAR(128). What I would like is some way of representing @NULL externally as a non-printable character, such as CHAR(128)! There is no way to get DataStage to actually do what the documentation says it does!

If you hold down Alt and type in 0129 then you get CHAR(129), if you hold Alt and type in 0127 then you get CHAR(127), but if you hold down Alt and type in 0128, then the job will abort!

ArndW · Post by **ArndW** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 5:12 am

Phil,

take a step back - the CHAR(128) is the internal representation.

What exactly do you want to do?

PhilHibbs · Post by **PhilHibbs** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 4:10 am

ArndW wrote:Phil,

take a step back - the CHAR(128) is the internal representation.

What exactly do you want to do?

I want to represent NULL externally as something different to an empty string. CHAR(128) seems an eminently sensible choice, but it seems that that is just about the only character that is not usable as the external representation.

In addition, I would like to be able to set this globally (or at a project level), rather than relying on the developer to set it on every sequential file component.

On reading the documentation, I assumed that this would happen by default but sadly this is not the case.