Re: SQL character field to numeric and back

Mark Allen wrote:

Situation is I have a 13 byte alpha field in a vendor supplied table
on the 400.

The first 9 positions are a next number field as 000123456 followed
by 4 blanks.

We are putting a .NET app together that needs to update/increment
the numeric portion of the data by 2 (in this example it would then
be 000123458).. We've tried various combinations of CAST, CONVERT,
SUBSTRING etc without any luck

Given that is a thorough and accurate representation of the data in all rows for the field [i.e. valid representation of a numeric using character digits, sign, decimal separator, and only leading or trailing blanks], since I believe v5r3 which has implicit casting between numeric and character, then the following example shows all that should be required. See the update:

create table vfile (a13 char (13))
;
insert into table vfile values('000123456 ')
;
update vfile set a13=digits(decimal((a13+2), 9, 0)
-- the parentheses around the addition are optional
;
select count(*) from vfile where a13=12345678
-- that should return one, for the one updated row

Regards, Chuck