title: Convert a long character field to numeric, NOT scientific notation (SAS)
body: <p>I need to join two tables - one table has householdid which is CHAR30, which appears to have center alignment and the other householdid as numeric 20.  I need to convert to the numeric 20  but when I do that it appears truncated, perhaps because of the strange alignment (not all of the 30 positions are actually needed).  </p>
  
  <p>When I try to keep the full 30 positions as a numeric I instead get a conversion to scientific notation so of course this will not work as a key id for later operations.</p>