Finding a semi colon (;) in ISPF

steve-myers · Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2021 7:44 pm

I recently wanted to find semi colons (;) in ISPF EDIT. I innocently thought

f ';'

would work. ISPF insisted there was an incomplete string in the command. OK, I'll try

f ";"

Same result. After a few minutes of thought I realized ISPF was too stupid to realize that a ; entered in quotes or double quotes was part of a string, not the end of the command. How to get around this problem? Well, finding the hex code for ; should work.

f x'??'

It took a couple of minutes to find the hex code for ; - 5E. I entered

f x'5e'

and sure enough, all the semi colons were high lighted. I found the bad ; and changed it to l, which I originally wanted.

Willy Jensen · Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2021 8:36 pm

Hint for finding a hex code: edit something, insert the character in a line then use the line command HX for that line. Note that HX is a toggle, use it once more and the normal display is back.

sergeyken · Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2021 9:38 pm

One more hint.

When searching a single line, or only a few ones in a huge text, with many occurrences of the character under question, the finding process can be simplified while using X ALL;F ALL X'5E'
Also HIDE X can be used to hide completely all unneeded lines from the screen.

Pedro · Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2021 9:48 pm

I suppose it depends on how often you use the semicolon...

I changed the command delimiter to be '~' so that I could freely use the semicolon in the primary command line. Change it in the ISPF options panel. In the example Sergey gave, I would do: X ALL~F ALL ';' and it would work as expected.

Yeah, I know changing the delimiter is not for everyone.

Joerg.Findeisen · Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:12 pm

The ISPF variable for the delimiter is ZDEL, just in case somebody want's to have an REXX/CLIST for reading it out.

Rohit Umarjikar · Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 8:55 pm

Try changing in the settings (start;0) -->Command delimiter to some other value like ‘:’ or ‘@‘ and then find ';' and you will now be able to find it. Once you get done the changes you needed, reset it back to ';'.
www.ibm.com/support/pages/how-can-i-find-semicolon-ispf-edit