Marc, you've had some good suggestions for formatting your telephone numbers but, maybe, you need to take a further step back and consider how you want to store them:
Because they're telephone _numbers_ it is natural to think of then as numbers rather than as text in the first place. Here, in the UK, there seems to be a few attempts to use characters in some numbers - I would hardly call it a trend yet. Should that sort of thing catch on you may find storing text is easier. Then again, the numbers seem to get longer as the years go by and numbers get used up. If they just stick a zero in front of all current ones then you have a problem if you're not storing as text. If, as they did with London number a few years back, they change some codes you may not be able to easily update your data... One way to cope might be to store your numbers as text with a comma between area code and number. You might even want to include an international code as well separated by another comma. When you use your data you can then use SRPL to replace the comma(s) with a space or SSUB to extract the components (assuming your delimiter character is a comma). You could even store the components in reverse order and extract them in reverse order so that you don't store something like: ,123,4567 but have: 4567,123 or 4567,123,44 instead. All it takes is a slightly longer variable definition or two on your forms and reports. You might also want to verify area codes which then becomes easy(ier). Of course, if you've only got a small number of telephone numbers you've already got your solution and you can just hit the delete button on this. Good luck, Regards, Alastair. ----- Original Message ----- From: Marc To: RBASE-L Mailing List Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 4:40 PM Subject: [RBASE-L] - Can you insert a blank space in text? Hi I store my phone numbers like 9183351555 9183352225 I am thinking about using a format in forms like this 918 335 1555 But If I change the format to that the phone numbers do not display correctly, I guess because they are stored 9183351555 So, how do you update the phone numbers to add the proper spaces? And if some of the numbers are 3352244 without the 918 would that mess things up? Thanks Marc
