Have you ever gotten an error that told you you had a "type mismatch" and wondered what that meant? Well I'm going to tell you!

Something that people who are used to other languages are familiar with is the concept of data or variable types. Well VBScript is a little weird in this respect. It uses only one type of variable called a variant. This variant type can contain any type of data and helps make conversion and manipulation easier. If a variable looks like a string VBScript treats it like a string and if it looks like a number then it's a number! In order to differentiate between text, numbers, dates, and other types, VBScript uses what are called variant subtypes which basically correspond to the types used in most other languages. Hey don't look at me.... I didn't come up with the concept. I'm just trying to explain it! ;)

So... if there's really only one data type, what does a type mismatch mean and why am I writing a sample about data types? Well... a type mismatch occurs when you try and do something inappropriate like for example divide a number by a string or pass a string to a function that only processes numbers! You may have noticed how I tend to name my variables starting with a lower case prefix. This is one way programmers attempt to keep track of what type of data a certain variable is supposed to contain in an attempt to not get type mismatches.

This sample will let you enter data and will try to convert it to the different variant subtypes telling you which conversions are possible and the resulting values. For reference I'm attaching a table of the different types and the data ranges they can contain.

Another variable type not listed here because it's a little more complex is the Array. An array is just an indexed set of other variables and is actually a topic in itself so I won't go into them here.

Now to really confuse you... variables can also be Empty which means they have not yet been assigned any value! This is not the same as variables which are Null! Variables which are Null have been intentionally set to contain no valid data. And as if that weren't enough you can also have variables which are equal to Nothing which means they're an object variable, but don't contain an object (basically a Null object variable)!

Some functions besides the conversion ones which you might find useful when playing with data types are VarType, TypeName, IsArray, IsDate, IsEmpty, IsNull, IsNumeric, and IsObject. Give them a try and pretty soon you'll have variable types down pat!

Now that I've got you really confused just play with the sample and take a look at the code... it's really not that bad once you get used to it!