>>>Hi All,
>>>
>>>Is there a better, or shall I say more elegant, way of extracting the numeric values from a date-formatted ("03/27/2014") text string than the following:
>>>
>>>lnmon=val(left(alltrim(this.text),2))
>>>lnyear=val(right(alltrim(this.text),4))
>>>lnday=val(substr(alltrim(this.text),4,2))
>>>lddate=date(lnyear,lnmon,lnday)
>>>
>>
>>I'll ask the obvious - have you tried CTOD(this.text)?
>
>
>CTOD() can do it as well but runs a risk of ambiguous date values (see the help). Using the DATE() function is safer because you need to specify the year, month and day specifically.

It appears that the date string is itself non-universal (what the OP showed was US date format).

A more universal approach would be

ln = DBIdatenum && however obtained
ldDate = {^1900/01/01} + ln

Hank