Parsing in Crystal Report

Which version of crystal reports?

You could look at Rtrim/Ltrim

Try string Functions

2016

If it always a number you can use VAL to get the value.

Use a formula
Left({YourField}, InStr({YourField, ' ')-1)

mlmcc

Try using rtrim(string) and see what you get.
You can use split on space and get the first element of the array.
You could use substring..

You could add this to the SQL query using SQL related

Using substring charindex or rtrim

The field is being used for sonething else,that you need to convert it to a datatype?

 To add to Ido's suggestion, if the field could every be empty (no characters at all, including spaces), the Split function would give you an empty array, and you'd get a subscript error.  You can use the Length function to avoid that:

if Length ({your_field}) > 0 then
  Split({your_field}, " ")[1]
else
  ""

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 James

Actually, James suggestion would fail to handle a case where the field has no spaces.
So here's a solution that handles such cases:

local stringvar array myArray := Split({your text field}, " ");
If UBound(myArray) > 0 Then
myArray[1]
ELSE
myArray[0];

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 No, it's fine.  If there are no spaces, Split will just give you an array with one element that contains the string (eg. Split ("a", " ") [1] will give you "a").  If you wanted the 2nd or later elements, then you could use UBound to make sure that the array had that many elements.

 Also, there is no 0 element in CR arrays, so your myArray[0] would give you an error.

 James

Because we are going after the 1st (or only) element, James is right.