What is REMOVECC?

(Originally posted 2009-04-10.)

To whoever (In the USA I think) Googled “what is REMOVECC” and got to this blog let me give you my thoughts on the matter. (And yes I know, it being a search, you might never come back to read this.)

To understand REMOVECC you have to understand that the “CC” refers to ASA (American Standards Association) Carriage Control, described here.

ASA (formerly ANSI) control characters appear in Position 5 for variable-length records (just after the Record Descriptor Word (RDW)). So a EBCDIC “1” in Position 5 would tell a printer to start a new page, and a “0” would tell it to skip a line.

Originally OUTFIL was used to create PRINTABLE reports. So these kinds of control characters were needed. But more modern (perhaps more complex) uses often don’t require ASA CC characters. So coding REMOVECC on the OUTFIL statement suppresses the control characters.

In this blog entry I used OUTFIL REMOVECC because my output is HTML. No HTML reader (such as a web browser) is going to tolerate ASA control characters. So I removed them.

I hope that clears this up. And I know the question was asked because my Firefox Extension has a “Referer URL” reporting element that tells me things like the Google searches that got people to my blog. I’d be flattered to think it was someone who was trying to understand the referenced blog post.

Update 10 April 2009

Perhaps I should also mention the relatively recent BLKCCH1, BLKCCH2 and BLKCCT1 OUTFIL options:

These replace the page eject carriage control character “1” with a blank in HEADER1, HEADER2 and TRAILER1 respectively. (HEADER3, TRAILER2 and TRAILER3 don’t need equivalent options.) Replacing with a blank still shifts the output to the right by 1 character, so REMOVECC may still be the best choice.

The PTFs for this enhancement appeared in April, 2006 (UK90006 / UK90007).