'SHIFT variable RIGHT deleting trailing space' not working

Question

I have a character field in a transaction that occasionally gets populated with a value that has a space at the end or at the beginning or both. This is causing the dataload to fail. I added code below to remove these spaces from the end and beginning-
SHIFT <variable> RIGHT deleting TRAILING space.
SHIFT <variable> LEFT deleting LEADING space.
The SHIFT LEFT works perfectly and deletes the space at the begining of the value but SHIFT RIGHT does not delete the space at the end for some reason. I tried defining the variable as a char (16), string but nothing seems to make it work.
Note: I cannot use CONDENSE because the value can have spaces in between that we cannot delete.
Any ideas why shift right wouldn't work?

Answer 1

Hi Maanasa,
                       First of all Shift works only with string datatype. So transfer the contents of that character field into a string datatype and do the shift operation.
Declare a string variable of that type. Data v_str type string.
Pass the contents of the character field into the string.
And do the shift operation on the string and pass the value of the string back to the character field.
Shift v_str by 1 places right.
Please try this.
Thanking you,
Jerry