I understand now - from your message and others' - that what I am trying to do is not possible using VFP 9 language. Which is fine. I found a way around it.
Thanks.
>I think what you're trying to do is not possible with a native built-in function. But you can certainly write code to do this but it'll be relatively slow.
>
>The point really is this though: Why would you ever not know the output format that you want the string to be? You should always know how many significant digits you are using and based on that you can use TRANSFORM() with the appropriate template. Otherwise something has to guess your intentions.
>
>If you do this manually you can trim off trailing 0's which is likely to give you very unsatisfying results too (rarely do you want to see numbers iwth a single decimal value for example).
>
>+++ Rick ---
>
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I am trying to create a generic way to convert any number to a string. Here are some examples, of the number and how they should be as a string:
>>
>>

>>2.4       ->  "2.4"
>>.00       -> ".00"
>>500.32337   -> "500.32337"
>>8.342    -> "8.342"
>>

>>
>>I tried TRANSFORM() but the second parameter has to match the number of decimal digits.
>>
>>Any suggestions?
>>
>>TIA