Question

I have a varchar field that should always contain a numeric (decimal) value when a filter is applied. But I get “Error converting data type varchar to numeric” when i run sql like this:

SELECT CAST(A.text AS numeric(38,16)) 
FROM Answers A
INNER JOIN Questions Q ON Q.ID = A.QuestionID
WHERE Q.Text = 'Rating'
AND isnumeric(A.text) = 1

There is only one value that passes the isnumeric test but fails the cast:

DECLARE @text varchar(100)
SET @text = '2.83417869359255E-02'
SELECT CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC(@text) = 1 THEN CAST(@text AS NUMERIC(38,16)) ELSE NULL END

How should I ensure that values like this are handled? At the end of the day I want to count all values that are less than 5, so numbers like ‘2.83417869359255E-02’ could be rounded to zero. I have also run a query to examine the values in the table together with the length of the varchar with these results:

MaxValue             MinValue             LenVarChar
-------------------- -------------------- -----------
0                    0                    1
10                   10                   2
2.2                  9.2                  3
3.55                 6.32                 4
5.453125             5.453125             8
2.79989361763        9.47216796875        13
2.089115858078       9.132080078125       14
1.1529632806778      9.8538990020752      15
0.64174896478653     9.83681106567383     16
0.111961431801319    0.991760730743408    17
2.83417869359255E-02 2.83417869359255E-02 20

Answer 1

Not storing numbers as strings would be my preferred solution but you could always check for D or E and then cast to float first.

DECLARE @text VARCHAR(100)

SET @text = '2.83417869359255E-02'

SELECT
    CASE
    WHEN ISNUMERIC(@text) = 1
    THEN      CASE 
              WHEN @text LIKE '%[DE]%' 
              THEN CAST(CAST(@text AS FLOAT) AS NUMERIC(38, 16))
              ELSE @text
              END 
    END 

There are still potentially problematic inputs however such as $ (which passes the ISNUMERIC test but would require a cast to money)