Get ASCII Character

There are times when you need a wizard to use a special character, but the character does not appear on the keyboard. The GET ASCII CHARACTER command allows you retrieve the character you need and place it into a variable to use later.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange. It is standard for encoding characters in numeric format so they can be understood by computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Originally developed for use with teletypes, today it is often used as a method for representing "non-printing" characters (those that do not appear on a keyboard).

  1. Select the character that you want to place into a variable:

    • Use the shortcut provided for the <Enter> character; or

    • Enter the ASCII code for the character you need

      • For a list of all available ASCII codes, see www.asciitable.com

      • Note that extended ASCII codes are not supported

  2. Enter the name of the variable into which you'd like to place the character

Example

At the end of each day, you download data from a web application for further analysis. The web application uses <Page Break> to separate individual records, so you also need to separate the data at each <Page Break>. How can you make this happen?

  1. Use the GET ASCII CHARACTER command to place the <Page Break> character (ASCII code 12) into a variable called page break.

  2. Use the Split command with the page break variable as the delimiter to parse the downloaded data.