If I have an item which is a number with some units appended to it, for example "19999Kbps\n", I would like to use preprocessing to convert this string into a number.

I create a regexp preprocessing step like:

This successfully isolates the number, but the data type is still Text. If I change the item to Numeric, it quickly goes to Unsupported with:

prestigeXDSL.updownstream" changed: Value "" of type "string" is not suitable for value type "Numeric (unsigned)"

I have worked around this by creating a "Dependent item" but I feel that this should either be handled implicitly by my setting the type on the item, or with an explicit type converstion preprocessing step.