Migrations are inevitable. The Yolo County Office of Education is on its way to a Windows-based system, after many years of HP 3000 reliance. Ernie Newton of the Information and Technology Services arm of the organization is moving his 3000 data. He's doing a clean-up, a great practice even if you're not heading off of MPE.

I am cleaning up our IMAGE databases for the inevitable move to Microsoft’s SQL Server. One thing I've encountered is that Suprtool does not like null characters where there should be numbers.

I know that I have invalid characters, (non-numeric), in a field called ITEM-NUMBER.  But when I try to find those records, Suprtool chokes and abruptly stops the search. Here's what I get...

IF ITEM-NUMBER < 0 OR ITEM-NUMBER > 9999
X

Error:  Illegal ascii digit encountered. Please check all data sources
Input record number: 1

Is there a way to run Suprtool to help it find these records? Query finds them just fine, but Query doesn't have to ability to do what I want to do. 

After being reminded that "Nulls are not numbers," by Olav Kappert, and "try to use a byte string to compare (like < "a" or > "z") or something like that," Robelle's Neil Armstrong weighed in.

You can find any character you want by using the Clean, $findclean and $clean feature. The first issue to deal with is to re-define the item-number as a byte type in order to use the function.