Re: What is the recommended way to handle character cells that have numeric values?

Whoops! Just after I said you have to be careful, I wasn't:

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 3:44 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For example, if you've got a Boston area code like '02108', it could
be stored in Excel as character '02108', in which case you use it
as-is; or it could be in Excel as float 2108.0, in which case you do
something like

myvar = %char(%int(xlvar));

The above loses leading zeros. What you REALLY need to do is, if
you're lucky enough to have a column that is exactly the right size,
zero-fill the column. I believe you can use %EDITC with edit code 'X'.

If your column is not exactly the right size (that is, if the value
can be character, with a total length less than the size of the
column), then you are either completely screwed (no way to retrieve
the leading zeros) or if you're lucky, the value *looks right* in
Excel, meaning you might be able to use the formatting information to
deduce the length.

John Y.