When passing strings to and from Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL, the host variables used have to be declared as arrays of data type char. One extra character space has to be declared to accommodate the \0 string terminator.
The Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL precompiler option "suppress trailing blanks (-b)" specifies whether the values returned from Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL will contain any trailing blanks before the terminator or not.
When such a string variable is supplied to Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL, only characters up to \0 are significant and \0 is effectively removed from the string. The length of the string for SQL purposes is therefore up to - but not including - \0.
Should the variable not contain \0 then only the first n-1 characters are significant to Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL, where n is the declared length of the host variable character array. If such a variable is used to insert or update a field, then any discrepancies between the value length and the field length are corrected by either truncating the string or appending sufficient blanks at the end of the string.
When Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL assigns a string value to such a variable e.g. in a FETCH statement, then \0 is appended to the value. This is the reason for reserving the last position of a character array for \0. Should the variable not provide enough space only the first n-1 characters are returned with \0 being added into the nth (last) position.
Should the field be smaller than the variable, blanks are appended between the end of the value and the \0 terminator in the final position. If, however, the precompiler option "suppress trailing blanks (-b)" is set, all string values returned from Adabas SQL Gateway Embedded SQL come with trailing blanks removed. In this case, the \0 terminator is after the last non-blank character.
Example:
EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
char h_surname [20];
EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION;