REXX and Column Formatting

CENTRE (also spelled CENTER)

can be used for format a text string withing a column of a specified width. For example, CENTRE('Report Title',55) returns a string 55 characters wide with the string 'Report Title' centred in it.

LEFT

can be used to left-justify a value in a field of a specified width. For example, LEFT('Thursday',20) returns a string 20 characters long beginning with the string 'Thursday'.

RIGHT

can be used to right-justify a value in a field of a specified width. RIGHT('123',20) returns a string 20 characters long with 123 appearing in the rightmost part. You can also specify a padding character which can be useful for generated dataset names e.g. RIGHT(yy,2,'0') to ensure that a year field always appears with two numeric digits in a dataset name even when the numeric variable yy is less than 10.

FORMAT

can be used to format a numeric value to a specified number of decimal places. For example, FORMAT('123.45',8,1) returns ' 123.5'; there would be eight positions to the left of the decimal point and one position after.

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