Verbs and Built-in Functions › &ZSHRINK

&ZSHRINK

Removes leading and trailing spaces and reduces multiple spaces within a string to one space.

&ZSHRINK text ...  text

&ZSHRINK is a built-in function and must be used to the right of an assignment statement.

&ZSHRINK provides a means of removing spaces from the beginning or end of a string, or removing multiple spaces from within a string.

Operands:

text

The text to be shrunk.

Notes:

The supplied text is returned with spaces removed according to the following rules:

• Leading and trailing spaces are removed.
• Two or more adjacent spaces are compressed into one space.
• If the last two characters are a space followed by a period ( .), the space is removed and the period placed following the last non-blank character.

Examples:

&A = &ZSHRINK THIS  IS A TEST . 
sets &A to  THIS IS A TEST.