Data Structure as a Character Value

Supported RPG Features

An unindexed data-structure name used as an operand is a fixed-length character value - the concatenation of its subfields' storage images, in declaration order. It may be assigned to a character field, concatenated, passed to %LEN (its byte length) or %CHAR, or displayed:

DCL-DS ds1;
  f1 CHAR(5);
  f2 CHAR(5);
END-DS;
DCL-S line CHAR(20);
f1 = 'HELLO';
f2 = 'WORLD';
line = ds1;                 // "HELLOWORLD" (then blank-padded to 20)
DSPLY %CHAR(%LEN(ds1));     // "10"

Numeric subfields contribute their raw storage image (zoned overpunch digits, packed nibbles), so the character image of a data structure mixing character and numeric subfields is byte-exact. An array of data structures (DIM) has no single scalar image and is not a character value.