Events

None

Properties

Methods

Notes

The default value of a Variant is 0. When you assign a variant to a String, numeric, or Date variable, REALbasic converts the value of the variant to the variable's data type. For example,

If there is any ambiguity concerning the type conversion of a variant, you should use one of the properties of the Variant class to force the REALbasic compiler to convert the variant to the desired type. In this example, the Product number is supposed to be the string concatenation of the Model number and the Part Number. To do this, use the StringValue property to tell REALbasic to do what you want:

Or, you could just type the variables as String and do string concatenation directly.

The Type method returns the type of the variant, provided it is not Nil. For example, the following code generates an NilObjectException error

.

On the other hand, the following example returns 0.

Variants used in an expression convert themselves to the type of the other operand, no matter what kind of data they contain, instead of deferring the type-conversion until runtime. This only affects expressions involving a variant operand and an operand of some other type, not expressions in which both operands are variants.

Consider the following example:

The comparison:

returns False since v is being treated as an Integer. If you instead use:

the comparison returns True.

The comparison

also returns True.

See Also

IsNumeric, VarType functions; DatabaseField, Date, Dictionary classes; Boolean, Color, Double, Integer, Single, String data types; Dim statement.