Capture patterns

["Jeff Wise" <jwise@...>]

Kein-Hong Man wrote:
>Any attempt at converting a financial figure to a floating point
representation without scaling gets me really worried... it might work now,
but >somewhere down the line, extra processing tacked in by a later
developer trusting the data integrity of the input layer might cause some
values to go >off by a wee bit.

Thanks for the additional information.

This is not a problem because the job is to send the text data to MS Excel.
Excel could not deal with the additional information in this file (mostly
the text description before the numbers) because Excel was upset with the
spaces in that text.  This text also had dashes aka "minus signs", and
periods aka "decimal points" which threw my original capture pattern off and
generated my query. Said another way, the Lua program just cleaned up the
data.

Your point is important because others may want to perform calculations on
numbers which were captured from accounting reports.  Being a mainframer,
the standard approach to such is to use packed decimal, or in some cases to
convert the dollar amounts to pennies (just throw away the decimal point)
and do binary arithmetic.











CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:  This E-mail message and all attachments, which originated from Sealy Management Company Inc, are intended solely for the use of the intended recipient or entity and may contain legally privileged and confidential information.  If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reading, disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of this message is strictly prohibited.  If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender of the message immediately and delete this message and all attachments, including all copies or backups thereof, from your system.  You may also reach us by phone at 205-391-6000.  Thank you.