Detecting and Handling Non-Printable Characters in DB2 SQL Using LOCATE() and REPLACE() Functions
When working with DB2 SQL on the IBMi platform, one of the challenges we might encounter is dealing with non-printable characters in our data. These are characters that don't have a direct representation on a standard keyboard and can cause display programs to crash if not handled properly. For this example, we'll be working with the CLANA00F file, which contains customer data. You can find details on how to create this file on my blog post here. Non-printable characters can sneak into our records for various reasons, and to prevent issues, we can run an SQL query that uses the LOCATE() function. This function returns the position of the first occurrence of a substring within a string, allowing us to detect these problematic characters. Suppose we have a customer name with a non-printable character, specifically the EBCDIC '0D' character, which corresponds to the "Carriage Return" (CR) control character in ASCII. To find this character in our records, we can u