I would like to able to take a certain amount of characters from a string to view their format, in Simatic Step 7. It won't let me look at it as a whole in the DB and i need to be able to see certain parts to make sure its reading the right info

 

You could set up a vat table and look at each character set, or use the demo version of kepware and set up excel to look at DB

 

Hello Ross;
Have you looked at the IEC functions library in Step 7? There are numerous functions built-in to manipulate, convert, compare and concatenate strings. I have used these functions in the past to parse strings I recieved over serial or Ethernet comms; it takeas a little bit of reading (details are available on these functions in the System and Standard Functions manual, chapter on IEC functions) but once you understand the basics, you should be able to find what you need.

Hope this helps,
Daniel Chartier