For those parts, consider using various APIs. Bruce Vining has provided some useful examples at The API Corner: Dynamically Editing a Numeric Value and The CL Corner: More on ILE CEE Time APIs.

Those provide an introduction to a couple useful APIs for this kind of work. The Edit Function APIs can also provide some help.

If you use DSPFFD, you’ll have probably everything needed to know how to handle individual fields, including start-/end-positions in the input buffer and data type. (You might use the List Fields (QUSLFLD) API instead.)

Overall, you will have a “generic” process. But it will have a bunch of little parts, each of which will be a potential learning experience.

Tom

That was the logic I was leaning towards …..

At the moment there’s no pressure, so I can figure out a “fancy” solution, maybe even throw in a few api’s to get the field data and retrieve it from the user space….. and of course devide them into need little chunks of coding…..
(don’t know how long this moment of relative peace lasts though, so in the end I might still go with the cpytoimpf).

Personally, I would still the CPYTOIMPF to do the heavy lifting
Phil

I just thought this should also be possible by using RPG, and preferably using just a few simple statement I did not know existed.

My objective is to have a program into which I input any record (format based on any file), this program should then find (possibly with some help of pointers or a stored DSPFFD) and convert any fields with a numeric data type, and in the end return the record to my calling program as a character string.

build a query which selects the records you want, and define an output field as being concatenated fields from the input. you can define a result field and convert the packed data to character within query/400 for example.

Thanks, however working with CPYTOIMPF, requires me to make a selection of the record I want to use first, push it to a single record temp file and then copy this temp file.

Or do you know of a way to combine a copy to import file with a selection on the “source” file?

Martijn

Unfortunately, a simple solution is very unlikely to be generic. Nor will any generic solution be simple.

You could create a reasonably “simple” solution for each specific file. You might even combine all of those into a single large program that would have a reasonably simple structure.

Or you could create a “generic” process that handled any (externally-described) file, but I sure wouldn’t call it “simple”.

Overall, Phil probably has the best suggestion. Just use tools that already exist. CPYTOIMPF is a very good possibility.

Tom