What I mentioned in my post was related only to the trailing spaces behavior. In other words

select cast('1234 ' as int);

is fine because the trailing spaces are removed before cast kicks in, but

select cast('1 234' as int);

will never fly simply because it is not a valid way to represent the number in every locale (though it is valid in some of them).

select

isnumeric('1234 ') trailing_yep,

isnumeric('1 234') middle_nope;

returns

trailing_yep middle_nope

------------ -----------

1 0

in the environment I use.

Oleg