Take care when trying to understand how four single-quote marks work.

Tom

Since I don’t see a reference to “MISBXG” in your code, I assume that it arises from this:

Your statement of “DELETE FROM mylib/myfile WHERE myfile = &USER” I had tried before.

It’s almost certain that that won’t work, if I understand what you want. The purpose of the example was to demonstrate what happens when the quotes are left off of the statement. The result is that the value of &USER is inserted into the statement without any quotes. SQL will then interpret the value as the name of a column. So, if you pass “MISBXG” in for &USER, SQL will expect to find a column named MISBXG.

So, you should see that:

1. You can’t have quotes around a replacement variable as part of the compiled statement.
2. And you can’t let the statement run without any quotes when the replacement variable represents a character.

Since neither of those two alternatives will work, you must use a third alternative.

If the quotes can’t be there when you compile the QM query and if the quotes must be there before the SQL statement executes, the only reasonable third alternative is to add the quotes at run-time.

You can add them to the character value that you pass in to the &USER variable or you can pass in an extra replacement variable that will carry the quote mark.

To stop prompting for a replacement variable, you need to pass the variable into the SETVAR() parameter. I showed one way to do that:

 STRQMQRY   QMQRY(REVEALDLT)
            SETVAR((USER &USER) ( 'q'  '''' )

The &q variable is referenced in the SETVAR() parameter. But notice that it is a lower-case “q”. You don’t have to use a lower-case “q”. You can use an upper-case “Q” or any other valid name.

If you use a lower-case replacement variable name in the SQL statement, you must pass a lower-case name into the SETVAR() parameter. If you look at the SETVAR() parameter, you should see that the name is quoted. That keeps it as a lower-case letter.

It was an example:

DELETE FROM mylib/myfile WHERE myfile = &q&USER&q

The SQL statement has the name “&q” as a lower-case name. The name in the SETVAR() parameter must be exactly the same. If you use a lower-case name in the SQL statement, you must pass a lower-case name into the SETVAR() parameter.

You could use an upper-case name:

DELETE FROM mylib/myfile WHERE myfile = &Q&USER&Q

Then you would call the statement like this:

 STRQMQRY   QMQRY(REVEALDLT)
            SETVAR((USER &USER) ( Q  '''' )

Or this would also result in an upper-case name:

 STRQMQRY   QMQRY(REVEALDLT)
            SETVAR((USER &USER) ( q  '''' )

Since there are no quote marks around the “q”, it will automatically be upper-cased.

I can’t be certain what is causing the prompting in your program because you didn’t show your new CL nor your new SQL statement. But I’d guess it’s because you have one of them as upper-case and the other as lower-case.

Tom

I had tried variations of your first option to no avail. However I modified it exactly how you show it and I get ‘Column MISBXG not in specified tables.’ which is what I’ve been getting all along.

Your statement of “DELETE FROM mylib/myfile WHERE myfile = &USER” I had tried before.

On your second option, I keep getting a prompt to “Type a value for variable “q” and press Enter.”
Once I input a ‘ quote, the record is deleted.
Now how do I get that to stop prompting?

Thanks,
Barry