Cannot escape question mark in CL command (was: Weird behavior trying to escape single-quotes)

[ibm]

Cannot escape question mark in CL command (was: Weird behavior trying to escape single-quotes)

[kadler]

The problem with the third one is the ? in the command string causing iCmd to think it's an output parameter. As a workaround, you can specify the execution mode:

# Two apostrophes - fail
itool.add(iCmd('cmd', "SNDMSG MSG('Howdy, y''all! How ''bout another aposterfee?') TOUSR(jyeung)", {'exec': 'cmd'}))

[jkyeung]

Interesting. So getting parameters back requires something called 'rexx' mode. Are there any other situations where one might want 'rexx' instead of 'cmd'? And I guess if your suggestion is to use 'cmd' mode, there isn't a way to escape question marks in case one needs both a literal question mark and an output parameter?

[kadler]

The only way to dynamically call a CL command with output parameters is to call it via REXX. AFAIK, it's much slower than calling directly, so I would suggest never to use it unless needed.

XMLSERVICE generates a REXX procedure on the fly, calls it, and parses its output. It's not very smart about it, so I suspect that any ? is interpreted as an output parameter. I could be wrong, though - it's hard to decipher this mess. FYI, Tony considered calling CL commands with output parameters a hack and something you should never do in production.

[jkyeung]

Well, fortunately, it's a rare CL command indeed which would require the ability to accept literal question marks as well as output parameters. Of course it would still be nice to have, but it's very low on my wish list. Closing.

If someone stumbling across this does happen to know a way to specify a literal question mark in 'rexx' mode, by all means, post a comment!