Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!reeder
From: reeder@ut-emx.UUCP (William P. Reeder)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: length of a character string
Summary: never mind
Keywords: null string,  intrinsic function LEN
Message-ID: <18603@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 89 21:50:39 GMT
References: <18585@ut-emx.UUCP>
Organization: University of Texas Computation Center
Lines: 29

In article <18585@ut-emx.UUCP>, I wrote:
> The best idea I have come up with so far for creating a "null" string
> is this:
> 
> 	character*80 null
> 	write ( null, * )
> 
> Does anyone have any better ideas?

Well, after a little more thought (and then someone wrote me a letter
with the same thoughts), it becomes clearer that FORTRAN has
BLANK strings, not NULL strings.  I came to this conclusion by
thinking about how character strings are compared with relational
operators: shorter strings are considered to be padded to the longer
length with blanks.  So, all I have to do is change
	if (ncar.eq."") then
with
	if (ncar.eq.' ') then
and everything is hunky-dory and standard conforming (except for those
lower-case letters :-).

Thanks for your time.
-- 
William "Wills" Reeder, The University of Texas at Austin, Computation Center
reeder@emx.utexas.edu, uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!reeder, (512)471-3241

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