Capturing a sequence of text from the host terminal

When the continuous attribute is true, the macro runtime treats the two pairs of row and column values as the beginning and ending positions (inclusive) of a continuous sequence of text that wraps from line to line if necessary to get from the beginning position to the ending position. The sequence of text can be as small as one character or as large as the entire application window.

The macro runtime:

Initializes the result string to an empty string
Reads the continuous sequence of text from beginning to end, wrapping around from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line if necessary
Stores the result string in the specified variable

For example, suppose that rows 21 and 22 of the host terminal contain the following text (each row is 80 characters):

........Enter / on the data set list command field for the command prompt pop-up
or ISPF line command............................................................

and suppose that the macro runtime is about to perform an Extract action with the following settings:

The continuous attribute is true.
The row and column pairs are (21, 9) (the 'E' of 'Enter') and (22, 20) (the 'd' of 'command').
The extraction name is 'Extract1'.
The data plane is TEXT_PLANE.
The string variable $strTmp$ is the variable in which the result string is to be stored.

Because the continuous attribute is true, the macro runtime treats the row and column pairs as marking the beginning and end of a sequence of text, with the beginning position at (21, 9) and the ending at (22, 20).

The macro runtime initializes the result string to an empty string. Then the macro runtime reads the sequence of text from beginning to end, wrapping around from the last character of row 21 to the first character of row 22. Finally the macro runtime stores the entire result string into the result variable $strTmp$. The variable $strTmp$ now contains the following string of 92 characters (the following text is hyphenated to fit on the page of this document, but actually represents one string without a hyphen):

'Enter / on the data set list command field for the com-
mand prompt pop-up or ISPF line command'

In contrast, if the continuous attribute is set to false in this example, $strTmp$ would contain a string of 24 characters, 'Enter / on tline command'.