CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-foxpro
Alan Rutledge
Alan Rutledge

Reputation: 51

What does a double-asterisk mean in a Visual FoxPro function call?

I'm trying to work with some Visual FoxPro 9.0 code written years ago by programmers now long gone. There are several uses of ALLTRIM() that include a double-asterisk in front of the field name being passed, such as:

fred = ALLTRIM( **barney )

where Barney is a character field in a table. When I try running that line in a VFP session, it errors out with "Function is missing )". But I'm uncomfortable supporting code that I don't understand - what does the "**" do?

I've tried storing the field to a memvar, in case there's a SCATTER in the code that calls this, with no change in the resulting error. I've tried storing other data types (numeric and boolean) to the memvar, still no change. I've been programming in dBase, then FoxBase, then FoxPro, then VFP, for almost 35 years - and I don't remember ever coming across this before. And yet, the program runs without errors, I just don't understand what it is doing.

In case any of this matters, the code in question is stored in a memo field in a table, then invoked with an EXECSCRIPT() call. And some of the tables that the code is working with (but not the one containing the code) are SQL Server tables, accessed through cursor adapters - so "barney" in my example is very likely a field in a cursor adapter, not a .DBF.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 520

Answers (1)

Alan Rutledge
Alan Rutledge

Reputation: 51

I found my answer. Searching for asterisks in source code was useless, of course, because of comments. But I finally thought, after posting this question, of searching for the string with surrounding quotes, and found that, before the code I was looking at was called with EXECSCRIPT(), it was also run through STRTRAN(), which substituted "m." or "." or some other appropriate prefix for the "**" in the code.

So, the double asterisk was internal to the application, and meant nothing to VFP itself.

Upvotes: 3

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