SEU Colour support

Danger

As of Code for IBM i 2.15.0, SEU colours will not be supported.

Some time in 2025, SEU Colour support will be removed. We announced this change May 2024. This means occasionally you may see invalid hexadecimal characters appear in your code where before, or when opened in SEU, were not there and instead provided unique colours.

This is because SEU uses the 5250 protocol to render colour information to the screen. This is not a standard feature of the source member, and as such, it is not supported by Code for IBM i.

Christian Jorgensen has written a stored procedure that can do the cleanup of those source members, which we recommend to everyone to use.

create or replace procedure Remove_SEU_colour_codes(
  Lib varchar(10), Fil varchar(10), Mbr varchar(10)
)
begin
  execute immediate 'create or replace alias QTEMP.MEMBER for ' concat Lib concat '/' concat Fil concat '(' concat Mbr concat ')';

  update QTEMP.MEMBER
     set SRCDTA = translate( SRCDTA, ' ', x'2021222324252628292C2D3031323334353638393A3B3C3D3E' );

  drop alias QTEMP.MEMBER;

  call SYSTOOLS.LPRINTF( 'Source member ' concat Mbr concat ' in ' concat Lib concat '/' concat Fil concat ' has been cleaned for SEU colour codes.' );
end

You call it like this:

call Remove_SEU_colour_codes( LIB => '<library>', FIL => '<sourcefile>', MBR => '<member>' )