Testing for a meaningful space at the end of a field

[Mike Strout]

I have a quick, dumb little question today about a seemingly simple translate. On a barcode field, Epic passes a meaningful space at the end of the string. The downstream app strips this space, causing the barcode to break. The workaround from the vendor is to put a backslash at the end of the field if the last character is a space.

Of course, Tcl sees the space and treats it as a list delimiter, so I do the following in the pre-proc box to capture the last character.

set xlateOutVals [ string range [ join $xlateInVals ] end end ]

I assign this to @lastChar, but can’t figure out how to test for a space in a xlate if statement. I have tried the following…

@lastChar eq =            # yes, there is a space after the =

@lastChar eq =” “

@lastChar eq ={ }

@lastChar eq =[ ]

I finally got it to work by assigning a blank space to a variable named @space and then using…

@lastChar eq @space

Is there a better way to do this?

Topic

[Robert Kersemakers]

Hi Mike,

Yes, it has been discussed a few times here that assigning a value to a variable and then comparing another variable with this one works; instead of comparing the variable against a value. So your solution is right.

However… I don’t understand your problem. Tcl will not see the space and treat the space as a list delimiter; that is something you do yourself, or can avoid yourself.

First rule of using tcl inside Cloverleaf: xlateInVals and xlateOutVals are lists, so always treat them that way!

So if the barcode is “EAN12345 “, then

 COPY @barcodefield -> @otherfield

with tcl code

Code:

lassign $xlateInvals code
echo “this is the field that is coming in: ”
set xlateOutVals [list $code]

will show the full field and @otherfield will have the value “EAN12345 “

So the piece of code to get the last character of a field is something like this:

Code:

lassign $xlateInVals code
set last_char [string range $code end end]
set xlateOutVals [list $code]

or in short

Code:

set xlateOutVals [list [string range [lindex $xlateInVals 0] end end]]

If you want the code to add a backslash behind a field if the last character is a space:

Code:

lassign $xlateInVals code
if {[string equal [string range $code end end] ” “]} {
 set code “${code}”
}
set xlateOutVals [list $code]

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[Author]

Replies