A method for converting arbitrary strings consisting of any combination of numbers, digits, or punctuation into numerical representations for comparisons at run time or any other time using a data store such as a relational database or full text search engine. The method is designed to build a numeric representation having small, fixed length values that are stored in numeric data types supported by the data store. All arbitrary string data is converted to a numeric representation using the method and placed in the data store. Queries of the data can be converted to a similar numeric representation.