I have been asleep while these 'discussions' have been going on, and you
will probably be reading this later.

AsRawString is probably a very good compromise, but does not 'fix' the
actual problem.

As I have said eariler, I use CHAR when the spaces are important. What
messed me up was either Datapump removed them? or perhaps it was
IB_WISQL when something else was changed. In any case, my application
was 'messed up' for a while until I twigged where the problem was. Not
being able to input the spaces in IB_WISQL is a bit of a bummer!
especially when you are trying to fix the problem.

I now have code which checks string length, and actually has to pad each
value BACK to 7 characters before it is transmitted to the mainframe or
compared with a mainframe input.

Jason, Can you garuantee that spaces in CHAR fields are NOT lost within
IBO if they are present. In the case of VARCHAR, I could not care less,
but this is probably also applicable there, until overwritten with a
string that has been trimmed.

For those of us who are always rushing, it is always the expected that
catches us out, the un-expected we can cope with.

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services