Re: Getting a Handle on RPG’s Open Access -- RPG400-L

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On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Alan Cassidy <ACassidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For one project I finally ditched CPYTOIMPF and converted every data field to an alpha string, and on some of the numeric fields I had to specially add an extra single-quote on the left to force Excel to make it alphanumeric. That was a date, in ISO format!

Interesting, and kind of confusing to me. First of all, I don't
recommend the prepend-a-single-quote approach, because then it
introduces a character (the single-quote) which isn't part of the
data. If this is acceptable to the recipient, fine, but it just
doesn't "feel right" to me.

What's confusing to me is why you would want a date to be interpreted
as text. Are you saying that the data itself, in the database, was
meant to be character, and only by coincidence happened to be the
string representation of an ISO-format date? Or was it an actual date
in the database? If an actual date in the database, why wouldn't you
want Excel to interpret it as a date?

John Y.

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