[sqr-users] defaults for UNSTRING?

["John Tucker" <john.tucker@oracle.com>]

I'm writing an interface that reads in a rather lengthy tab delimited file, and 
wondered if there was any way to put defaults into the Unstring command.  For 
example, if I have John[tab][tab]Smith for $First $Middle $Last, I'd love it if 
$Middle could come out as ' ' instead of null.

I wrote a procedure in an SQC that takes care of that stuff as follows, but I 
wanted to see if any of you knew of something simpler that I'm missing.

...

Unstring $File_data by $tab into $First $Middle $Last

Do Clean-String($First, $First)
Do Clean-String($Middle, $Middle)
Do Clean-String($Last, $Last)

...

Begin-Procedure Clean-String($Input, :$Output)

Let $Output = ltrim(rtrim($Input, ' '), ' ')
If IsNull($Output)
   Let $Output = ' '
End-If  

...

This should work really well for a fixed length file - Do 
Clean-String(substr($file_data, 1, 30), $First) - so I'll hang onto it even if 
you all have a better suggestion for the tab-delimited file.  Thanks for any 
ideas!

-John Tucker
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