At 02:03 AM 10/14/2005, John Docherty wrote:
what I am wanting to do is to define a function which combines two integer values and a text value to form a real value which will then uniquely define an item matching a row in a table.
John, Did you know that R:BASE already include such function? IHASH function can be used to create an integer value from a text value. The function was designed to create effective integer keys from long text columns. (IHASH(text,width)) returns a hash value for a specified number (WIDTH) of characters in a text string (TEXT) beginning with the first character. The function, IHASH, converts the entire text value, or just a specified number of characters. You can use IHASH for faster access to data. Very Best R:egards, Razzak.
