Helen Borrie wrote:

> are you sure your strings don't contain any leading or in-line blanks
> or other alpha characters like hyphens, decimal points, dollar signs,
> commas and so on?
>

Helen meant *extraneous* commas, minus, signs and dots. Firebird
happily translates strings containing numbers with US markup
characters like -123 1.23 and 123,456. Leading spaces seem
to be OK too.

SQL> show table t2;
F1 INTEGER Nullable
F2 VARCHAR(10) Nullable
SQL> select * from t2;

F1 F2
============ ==========

<null> 124
<null> 1.24
<null> -125
<null> 123,456

SQL> insert into t2 (f2) values (' 1243');
SQL> update t2 set f1 = f2;
SQL> select * from t2;

F1 F2
============ ==========

124 124
1 1.24
-125 -125
123456 123,456
1243 1243