ikegami:

Yeah, if I were going to preprocess the string, I would do it that way. But I opted to postprocess it instead. Since I rarely have a numeric field immediately adjacent to an alpha field, it didn't seem like much of a restriction. Also, I thought that preprocessing the string and argument list might get a bit messy if there were many field definitions.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.