Re: Oracle Report*Writer Question - '.' in char fields.

2843600_at_jeff-lab_at_queensu.ca (Steve Frampton) writes:

> I am experiencing a strange problem when it comes to writing reports with
> '.' characters in the fields. It seems RPT/RPF adds extra spaces if it
> sees the '.' character.
> [...]
> Any ideas of why this is happening and how to avoid this?

It's a feature of RPF. Page 29 of the User's Guide states:

"RPF interprets a period terminating a word as end-of-sentence, and inserts two spaces before the beginning of the next sentence."

The User's Guide goes on to explain that you can use the RPF escape character, backslash (\), to force RPF to treat a period as a regular character and not an end-of-sentence meta-character. What they don't mention is that you can use the TRANSLATE function in SQL to do this for text retrieved from a table (as opposed to editing literal text in an RPF file by hand, which is what they show in the User's Guide). Something like this in an RPT macro should do the trick:

	SELECT	TRANSLATE(TEXT,'.','\.')
	INTO	...
	FROM	...

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David Hazledine                                                EMBL Data Library
Database Administrator                                                PF 10.2209
EMBL Data Library                                      69012 Heidelberg, Germany

Internet: Hazledine_at_EMBL-Heidelberg.DE