Very good question. Something I should have done from the beginning (sorry, my mistake).
The textbox is part of a class that is used to do simple querying on a table. The value of the textbox is used in a the where clause of the query, so determening on the type of data in the textbox my where clause changes

if input is date: where dDate=textbox.value
if input is numeric: where nExpression=textbox.value
if input is character: ... where cExpression=textbox.value