$LOWER(

General Form:

1.     alpha_receiver = $LOWER(alpha_expression)

2.     alpha_receiver = $LOWER()

3.     $LOWER() = alpha_expr

This statement is used in the first form to translate all characters in the specified alpha expression into their lowercase equivalents. The newly translated characters are then stored in the alpha receiver.

The translation is performed using a built in translation table. For systems using Unicode the table encompasses all the Unicode characters that have case and no setup is required but for older systems, using particular code pages, the table to use is determined by the value of byte 50 of $OPTIONS RUN. This byte is ignored for Unicode systems.

The Latin-1 codepage can be used to translate the case of most western European characters, for example:

STR($OPTIONS RUN,50,1)=HEX(01)
Result$ = $LOWER("ABÄ")

would set Result$ to "abä".

The second form of the statement can be used to extract the translate table currently in effect on non-Unicode systems.

To use a different locale, say the Latin-2 codepage used in Eastern Europe, then the third form of the statement can be used to set a new user defined translate table which must be 256 bytes long. Though the table can be set using this form of the function at any time, to activate this table byte 50 of $OPTIONS RUN should be set to hex(02).

STR($OPTIONS RUN,50,1)=HEX(02)
$LOWER() = latin2$

Compatibility

This function was introduced with KCML 5.0. The user defined tables and the $LOWER() functions were added for KCML 6.00. Unicode was introduced in KCML 6.20.

See also:

$UPPER