Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

  ◄QuickSCREEN►      ◄Details►      ◄Example►      ◄Contents►      ◄Index►
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
PUT (File I/O) Statement Details
 
Syntax
  PUT [#]filenumber[,[recordnumber][,variable]]
  or
  PUT [#]filenumber[,{recordnumber|recordnumber,variable|,variable}]
 
  Argument       Description
  filenumber     The number used in the OPEN statement to open the
                 file.
  recordnumber   For random-mode files, the number of the record to be
                 written. For binary-mode files, the byte position in
                 the file where writing is done. The first record in a
                 file is record 1. If you omit recordnumber, the next
                 record or byte (the one after the last GET or PUT
                 statement, or the one pointed to by the last SEEK) is
                 written to. The largest possible record number is
                 2^31 -1 or 2,147,483,647.
  variable       The variable containing the output to be written to
                 the file. The PUT statement writes as many bytes to
                 the file as there are bytes in the variable.
 
                 If you use a variable, you do not need to use MKI$,
                 MKL$, MKS$, or MKD$ to convert numeric fields
                 before writing. You may not use a FIELD statement
                 with the file if you use the variable argument.
 
                 For random-access files, you can use any variable as
                 long as the length of the variable is less than or
                 equal to the length of the record. Usually, a record
                 variable defined to match the fields in a data record
                 is used.
 
                 For binary-mode files, you can use any variable.
 
                 When you use a variable-length string variable, the
                 statement writes as many bytes as there are
                 characters in the string's value. For example, the
                 following two statements write 15 bytes to file
                 number 1:
 
                   VarString$=STRING$ (15, "X")
                   PUT #1,,VarString$
 
                 See the examples below for more information about
                 using variables rather than FIELD statements for
                 random-access files.
 
                 A record cannot contain more than 32,767 bytes.
 
 
You can omit the recordnumber, the variable, or both. If you omit only
the recordnumber, you must still include the commas:
 
  PUT #4,,FileBuffer
 
If you omit both arguments, you do not include the commas:
 
  PUT #4
 
The GET and PUT statements allow fixed-length input and output for
BASIC communications files. Be careful using GET and PUT for
communications because PUT writes a fixed number of characters and
may wait indefinitely if there is a communications failure.
 
  Note: When using a file buffer defined by a FIELD statement, LSET,
        RSET, PRINT # , PRINT # USING, and WRITE # may be used to put
        characters in the random-file buffer before executing a PUT
        statement. In the case of WRITE #, BASIC pads the buffer with
        spaces up to the carriage return. Any attempt to read or write
        past the end of the buffer causes an error message that reads
        "FIELD overflow."