There are two options for dealing with these footnotes. If you are checking for one or two values, you can do a character compare, using character constants instead of numeric ones. If you use this approach, remember that the numeric footnotes are padded with leading zeroes. If you forget to pad out the constant, you will never get a match. A safer approach is to convert the footnote to a number and then perform a numeric comparison.
Some companies have more than one stock issue.
If you retrieve data solely on CNUM you may get duplicate data, depending on the company. Missing Values Compustat uses a total of five different missing value codes. Monthly Summary - Contains mean, median, sdev, etc. for analysts' forecasts on a monthly basis. International Summary and Detail - Similar to monthly summary and detail data, only for international companies.