COLLATE

COLLATE

Generates a collating sequence character string

UNIX specifics: uses ASCII collating sequence

Syntax
Details

Syntax

COLLATE(start-pos <,end-pos>)|(start-pos<,,length>)

Details

The COLLATE function returns a string of ASCII characters. The ASCII collating sequence contains 256 positions, referenced with the numbers 0 through 255. The string returned by the COLLATE function begins with the ASCII character specified by the start-pos argument. Characters above 127 correspond to characters used in European languages as defined in the ISO 8859 character set. If end-pos is specified, the string returned by COLLATE contains all the ASCII characters between start-pos and end-pos. If length is specified instead of end-pos, then the COLLATE function returns a string with a length of length. The returned string ends, or truncates, with the character that has the value 255 if you request a string length that would contain characters exceeding this value.

Unless you assign the return value of the COLLATE function to a variable with a defined length less than 200, the ASCII collating sequence string is padded with blanks to a length of 200. If you request more than 200 characters, the returned string is truncated to a length of 200.

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