In reply to Chris Hemedinger.

I think you're underselling this task, Chris!

People have asked me how to do this quite frequently, enough so that I think with a little more hardening it could be a real asset in the SAS toolbox. Is there anything left except numeric precision, handling odd character strings, and data representation and coding? (My view is that passwords, indexes, and compression aren't logically a part of this process).

Just a thought...
Tom

P.S. Yes, I've been navigating the numeric precision swamps since System/370. Did you know the old mainframe OS had a sixteen byte floating point data type?