Re: [O] how to force org-mode to interpret number as string

[Stefan Huchler]

Bastien <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Stefan,
>
> Stefan Huchler <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> The Problem is that that org-mode seems to auto-format the salary column
>> as a number.
>
> That a problem here, but I guess this is handy in many circumstances.
>
> Why don't use just turn the number into a string in your code?

if I could do that, without loosing the numbers behind the point I would
be ok with that, but I dont want a fixed system for 1 table, but for a
random table. 

I wrote something similar in python:

https://github.com/spiderbit/mmailer

I just wanted to migrate it into org-mode/emacs because I have not to
deal with csv files and because I can use the email-ability from
emacs/gnus.

Its just stupid to have a seperate smtp-client-code and
smtp-auth-settings in such tool.

Its around 500 lines of code in emacs I would get that done in maybe 20
lines of code.


If that problem would not occur.


If there is something in elisp that is like that:

if is-that-a-number(column):
  column = number-to-string(give-the-complete-number(column))

I would be happy to use that ^^. But If he saves it as number I think he
will not save how many zeros were behind the point.

So basicly there is no solution to it that will satisfy me.

I really struggle to use the org-mode structures its always a little bit
off, it sounds all good but fails in small details.

Sorry whining but it is frustrating when you have 99% and you need to
get the 1% problem out of the way but it will not happen except writing
seperate 1000 lines of code in R or something like that (that was the
workaround for my last problem with my last "group-by" problem, with
org-mode tables.

That then makes the 99% just worthless because it is useless if its
static code that is not dynamic and works for this kind of problems but
only for this one example of the problem.


I dont want to repreat myself. Maybe I even could make that code a
seperate small emacs-package. Because there seems that there is no
serial-mail tool for emacs right now.

Maybe I am wrong here, but I searched long and did not find one.

Maybe you or somebody else can point me to it, then I maybe dont need
that to work anymore.


It´s just so stupid that seems for me very general problems, that you
maybe have a implizit declaration of a variable but you should still
have a way to define it manually there is even a way to do this, to
force a field to be a number but not to force it to be a string.

Something like that:

tblfm: $4 = ($4);N or was it \N why is there no \S and good.

ok its not in the information gathering and a seperate process but in
the table you have at least the full number there.


Hope there is one emacs-way to do that. That dont need learning another
programming language like R and works for any strings.

I am a bit disapointed in org-tables because they never work like I need
them too.

I think the only alterantive would be to save the org-capture data in a
csv-file so I have to write thousends of lines of code to manage paths
and projects and whatever like I have in python.

Then because csv works better in not converting without me saying it to
convert a string to a number.

and then use file-open blabla.


But nice that you did answer that fast ;)