# Print sentence and automatic text split

**URL:** <https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/t/print-sentence-and-automatic-text-split/242571>\
**Category:** Forum\
**Tags:** Adabas-Natural, Natural, Mainframe-Integration, Natural-on-Mainframes, Natural-on-Linux, NaturalONE\
**Created:** [July 4, 2021, 1:45pm UTC](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/t/print-sentence-and-automatic-text-split/242571 "2021-07-04T13:45:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Javier\_Gonzalez2](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/techcommunity/user_avatar/techcommunity.softwareag.com/javier_gonzalez2/32/6988_2.png) [@Javier\_Gonzalez2](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/u/Javier_Gonzalez2)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2021, 1:45pm UTC](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/t/print-sentence-and-automatic-text-split/242571/1 "2021-07-04T13:45:14Z")

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Using PRINT I want to know how to avoid the automatic split of the words:

- Husband/wife

- Año (means year)

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**Author:** ![George\_Cooper](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/techcommunity/user_avatar/techcommunity.softwareag.com/george_cooper/32/7831_2.png) [@George\_Cooper](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/u/George_Cooper)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2021, 7:07pm UTC](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/t/print-sentence-and-automatic-text-split/242571/2 "2021-07-05T19:07:14Z")

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Hi Javier,

I think you are out of luck for Husband/Wife. No matter how flexible and functional the Natural developers try to make a language statement, there is always something that can’t be handled. Unlike the SEPARATE statement, the PRINT statement doesn’t seem to allow you to provide a list of delimiter characters. So PRINT is always going to treat the "/’ as a delimiter and split the text there when it needs to wrap a word at the end of a line. Anything that’s not a numeric or alpha character will act as a delimiter.

Could you possibly Examine/Replace “Husband/Wife” with “Spouse”? 😉 Otherwise, to keep them together you would have to program your own version of PRINT, building your output line 1 character at a time, or possibly using SEPARATE into an array with only blank as a delimiter, and then COMPRESS the array fields into an output line until hitting a field that would exceed your line size.

As for Año, it seems to me that the accented n should be treated as an alpha character, and not as a delimiter. Maybe using the Spanish Code Page would define all the Spanish accented characters as non-delimiters. Or maybe you can discuss with your Natural administrator or DBA the use of a Natural Profile parameter called SCTAB or the NTSCTAB macro to make Spanish accents non-delimiters.

As the Parameters manual shows,

**SCTAB - Scanner Characters**

This Natural profile parameter can be used to overwrite the definitions in the scanner character-type table `NTSCTAB` , which is contained in the configuration module [`NATCONFG`]. `SCTAB` corresponds to the [`NTSCTAB`] macro in the [Natural parameter module].

**Example of SCTAB Parameter**

SCTAB=(5E,LOWER,NDELIM,‘ß’,SPECIAL,7B,SPECIAL,‘Ä’,UPPER,NDELIM)

**Examples of NTSCTAB Macro**

```
     NTSCTAB 5E,LOWER,NDELIM
     NTSCTAB 'ß',SPECIAL
     NTSCTAB 7B,SPECIAL
     NTSCTAB 'Ä',UPPER,NDELIM

```

This example shows the definition of ‘Ä’ with attributes Upper Case and Non-delimiter. You might also be able to redefine a “/” as a Non-delimiter this way, but this being a pretty global change for the duration of your session or job, I’m not sure what other statements and processes would be affected. Anything that expects a “/” to be a delimiter by default would be a problem then.

Good luck,  
George

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/techcommunity/original/3X/c/d/cd19967bb605d28a72d77eb83a1cae22f3df2eb8.svg) [@system](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2021, 7:07pm UTC](https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/t/print-sentence-and-automatic-text-split/242571/3 "2021-10-03T19:07:21Z")

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