Formatting Variables

You can control the case, length, quoting, and other aspects of the format of values resolved from variables

The variable formatting options are the following:

Option	Description
.L	Lower-case characters
.U	Upper-case characters
.F	Combined with L or U, applies conversion to first character
.q	Enclose the variable between single quotes if it is not already.
.Q	Enclose the variable between double quotes if it is not already.
.T	Removes blank spaces
.H	Converts number to hexadecimal
.c	Upper-case first letter and lower-case next letters
.`n`	Maximum length where n is the number of characters
`n`J	Justifies to fixed length where n is the number of characters
`-n`J	Right justify variable text to fixed length where `n` is the number of characters
width	Copies the specified minimum number of characters to the output buffer
.[-]`precision`	Copies the specified maximum number of characters to the output buffer
M	Extracts a portion of the variable name, this option uses the width and precision parameters to identify the portion to extract

You embed formatting options in variable syntax as follows:

%[[?][-][width][.[-]precision][c][H][F][U|L][T][M][q][Q]:]<varname>%

For example:

%.L:TABLE%

The table below shows formatted variables and their results in a script for the table EMPLOYEE.

Template statement with variable	Resulting script statement
create trigger %TABLE%	create trigger EMPLOYEE
create trigger %.L:TABLE%	create trigger employee
create trigger %.U:TABLE%	create trigger EMPLOYEE
create trigger %.4:TABLE%	create trigger EMPL
create trigger %.4L:TABLE%	create trigger empl