implemented to help prevent errors in matching up pluggable LAF directories and paths/files
eliminating malformed URLs - duplicate file separators or missing file separators.
Attach conversion metadata to a String object to see where it came from and with which mask it was generated, the encoding, the local languages used, padding, etc.
Sets the length and the precision of the Number, Integer or String to the specified length & precision
Note: no truncation of the value takes place, this is meta-data only!