4GL Newbie Question

Hi: I am a new Informix 4GL user, and what I want to know is whether I can open a file like with fopen in C and have a pointer to read the file in. (ASCII file). Thanks. Denis

I don't believe so. If you need to open and read files then you should try ESQL/C, which is essentially a C program with embedded SQL statements. Informix-4GL, which I happen to like a lot, is designed to interact with a database, and it has good facilities for creating a user interface and reports. It's short on the type of tools and facilities that can be used in third generation language programs. Concerning the ASCII file, one way to get at it via 4GL is to first insert into into a database table, but I don't think you has this in mind. Denis Hung wrote: > Hi: > > I am a new Informix 4GL user, and what I want to know is whether I can open > a file like with fopen in C and have a pointer to read the file in. (ASCII > file). > > Thanks. > Denis

Informix 4GL does not include the ability to easily read a flat file. However, there have been many that have used the C langauge call interface (see I4gl Reference) to read flatfiles into 4GL via C functions. I have personally used this method and it works well. http://www.iiug.org/software/software_index.html includes some files that will do this. ------ Dave Killough Denis Hung <denis@bow.intnet.mu> wrote in message news:7hhgl3$2pl$1@news.intnet.mu... >Hi: > >I am a new Informix 4GL user, and what I want to know is whether I can open >a file like with fopen in C and have a pointer to read the file in. (ASCII >file). > >Thanks. >Denis > >