Exactly and without error messages. From my understanding of the task, "a) check whether var CNT_&STATE is a character or numeric var", was refering to the variable, not its contents specifically as often times character viarbles only contain numeric data. Also, "b) if it is character var then to change it to numeric", by default, if you change a character field to a numeric, you will lose any non-numeric data as it is nolonger compatible in the new datatype. On the other hand, if he only wanted to change those from character to numeric where it could without data loss, then you could do another check prior to the sql statemes above to trap the character variables that you didn't want converted.
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