Re: checking for numeric chars

[David Thompson-Hall <david.thompson-hall@DOIT.WISC.EDU>]

Oops, sorry, here I thought I was asking a simple thing, and I wasn't clear...

I want to check if a given character in a string is numeric.  So I am
already looping thru the string and grabbing individual charactes, now I
want to figure out if they are numeric...

At 03:15 PM 2/11/02 -0700, Alan Ljungberg wrote:
>Do you want to determine if only a single character is numeric then i would
>evaluate if the ascii value is beween 048 and , 057.  048 and , 057 are the
>ascii values for 0 and 9 , if the acsii value is any value between the
>character is numeric.  This will work for numeric characters in CHAR
>fields.

This is what I want to do - but I'd rather not check against ASCII codes,
this seems cryptic and hard to maintain.

The idea I had was

if $char = to_char(to_number($char)

Someone suggested in private email I use translate...

if Translate($char,'1234567890','X') = 'X'
   ! then char is numeric
else
   ! not numeric
end-if

this is certainly a good use of translate...

so which one is "better"?  Quicker?  more elegant?

any other ideas?

DTH

David Thompson-Hall                                     1210 W. Dayton St.
Programmer/Analyst                                      Madison, WI 53706
Apps Tech/Operational Support Apps                      608/265-9571
Div of Info Technology (DoIT)
University of Wisconsin-Madison david.thompson-hall@doit.wisc.edu