trimming a subfield

If all you want is the first 15 characters, regardless, then just do a  string range:

set var “EMERGENCY DEPT VISIT”

set var [string trimright [string range $var 0 14]]

I added the the string trimright to get rid of any spaces that may result from the string range (as would be the case here).

Hope this helps…

Tom

Kevin,

Make sure there is no other white space in the text (such as tabs or newlines) that can cause trimright to trim unless you specify the character set you want trimmed.

I usually specify ” ” if I only want to trim spaces.

Kevin,

In many cases the receiving system does want to see the trailing spaces as that may mean something to them. So if tht is what you think will work best just use the string range.

However the trimright should not remove any trailing non white space characters as you appear to be experiencing.

Oops…sorry about that……Monday on a Friday type of day!

Are you doing this in the translate?  The only reason that I could see those commands doing what you are referring to would be if you were doing this on a value in the translate that was internally being treated as a list.  In that case you would want to grab the value as a list so that it doesn’t split on the whitespace when accessed.