Thread: casting question

I have a column  (quantityonhand     | character(15) | default '' )
that I would like to use to perform simple math.
I can't seem to get the syntax for casting and  have tried various
combinations of "select  to_number(quantityonhand::text, '99G999D9S')".
Can not get get past ERROR:  Bad numeric input format ' '.

   Any help would be greatly  appreciated....


tanks

On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, A. Van Hook wrote:

>
>
> I have a column  (quantityonhand     | character(15) | default '' )
> that I would like to use to perform simple math.
> I can't seem to get the syntax for casting and  have tried various
> combinations of "select  to_number(quantityonhand::text, '99G999D9S')".
> Can not get get past ERROR:  Bad numeric input format ' '.
>
>
>     Any help would be greatly  appreciated....

You probably have a value in there which is not convertable to a numeric
(such as the default '').

Your fields contain spaces, because of the char(15)
datatype padding them out.  The numeric conversion
routine can't handle those spaces: you will need to
use a trim function (probably rtrim() will be best) to
take them out.

You can avoid this problem if you use varchar (or
text) instead of char datatype.

--- "A. Van Hook" <hook@kcp.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I have a column  (quantityonhand     | character(15)
> | default '' )
> that I would like to use to perform simple math.
> I can't seem to get the syntax for casting and  have
> tried various
> combinations of "select 
> to_number(quantityonhand::text, '99G999D9S')".
> Can not get get past ERROR:  Bad numeric input
> format ' '.
> 
> 
>     Any help would be greatly  appreciated....
> 
> 
> tanks
> 
> 
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