Sergey,

Although you suggestion would work, I have found from my experiences that the format of the character field may not always be consistent with padding the zeros. By casting the character field to a numeric then I can be sure to always group as expected. If I was guaranteed the format would be consistent with the padding then your suggestion would be better for performance.

>>The trick here is to set the decimals correctly so the output is formatted as you expect. Here is the code:
>>
>

>LOCAL lCurrentDec
>>lCurrentDec=SET("Decimals")
>>SET DECIMALS TO 0
>>SELECT name,PADL(MIN(VAL(item)),5,"0") as "Start", ;
>>	PADL(MAX(VAL(item)),5,"0") as "End" ;
>>	FROM MyTable ;
>>	GROUP BY name ;
>>	into CURSOR curMyTable
>>SET DECIMALS TO &lCurrentDec
>

>
>Wouldn't it be the same as

SELECT name, ;
>        MIN(item) as "Start", ;
>	MAX(item) as "End" ;
>	FROM MyTable ;
>	GROUP BY name ;
>	into CURSOR curMyTable

?