Why do you need it as a numeric value?, if you create the tag with the character string it will sort it like this:

123A123
123B123
234A234
AAA3AAA
..

It will sort starting with the first character, you can pad with zeros in the tag , padl(field,len(field),"0") to avoid getting a "2" after a "1000" for instance.



>Does anybody know a workaround for the VAL() function to create an index based on the value of a string field that can have numbers and alpha text in it? If you print the val('123A453') you get the value of 123.00 as it stops at the alpha text portion. This is what I want, the value of the beginning number portion of the field. However, when you issue INDEX ON VAL(fldname) TO indexname you get an error message that data was lost and it does not create the index.
>
>Thanks.
>Colombo.