Why LabVIEW allows characters within Numeric control

[Shankar*]

Why LabVIEW allows characters (Key down) within Numeric control,

When I hit Enter button, it’ll clear all the characters and returns to 0.

My question is why does it allow specific characters(not all)?

[Khachik91 · Accepted solution]

It is done for user convenience.

So to enter 5000 you can enter 5k, or to enter 0.000005 you can enter 5u.

LabVIEW allows you to enter text then validates it after you hit enter.

Hope this helps.

[Shankar*]

Thank you Kachik 🙂 

I do agree that it's really useful, if I change the data type(representation) to U8 then I dont think most of these units are applicable!!

[Khachik91]

Yes, for example 5u will return 0 and 5k will be 255 🙂

[Sam_Sharp]

It's also how you enter Not a Number (NaN).

[garrettmarsh]

Also things like "1E+3", as well as "Inf"

[GerdW]

Hi Sankar,

if it disturbs you, you can use an event structure to filter any unwanted chars while the user is typing them…

[Shankar*]

Hi GerdW,

Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

I wanted to know the reason why It's not been implmented as part of the control, but allowing these chars(units) does make sense 🙂

Kind Regards

Sankar

[zou]

Bottom line: What is a numeric control ?

A String !

A numeric Windows object (not talking about G object) is just a text box limited to numbers.

In C language, U8 is defined as char

In LabVIEW, you can re-format a numeric control, and use it as a string.

[zou]