RE: A sequence, by any other name
- Posted by Jonas Temple <jktemple at yhti.net> Feb 28, 2001
- 434 views
> Offhand there are two ways i can think of to do this. > In general, for any arbitrary sequence there is no way to > distinguish a character from a number that is stored in it. > For example: > n={65} --these are both exactly > n={'A'} --the same sequence. > > There is a second method which involves adding > the number 256 to any positive integers in order to > distinguish between characters and integers but it involves > alot more testing on the number before you know what it is. > If your interested i'll post that method next time. > One good point about it is that it doesnt require any more > space to store numbers like the first method does, which > could be a big benefit for large data. > Al, Thanks for the reply. I would indeed be interested in seeing what you've done. I'm also glad that doing this is not ane easy task...I thought I was missing something. I'll let the cat out of the bag here...what I'm TRYING to do is do add support of Matt's EUSQL library into my SQL utility that got posted to the contributions page. The utility only supports ODBC but I would like to also include the EDS. I use the EDS quite a bit and would like a tool to verify that my program is doing file i/o correctly. I also have the EDS viewer by Tone but I like being able to see the entire record. So that's why I need to be able to determine numeric vs character sequence. I don't know what data types I would be dealing with until run time. Maybe the solution here is to beg Matt to change the EUSQL to not only store the field name but the type as well. That would make my life easier. Just a thought. Jonas