Combining default! and ?number

In FM 2.3.12, I'd like to assign a variable to be a number which is
either parsed from a string parameter (perhaps from a query string), or
default it to a fixed constant.  I'm not sure if there's a concise
syntax for doing this.

The first code I saw to do this was like this:
 <#assign page>${pageArg!1}</#assign>			[1]

But then all users from then on had to do
    page?number + 1
to refer to it.  Unfortunately, that fails because page is now a number,
and next time, page?number will fail.

So I changed it to this:

<#assign page = pageArg!1 />

This works when pageArg isn't specified, as does this
   page + 1
work properly on every iteration.

However, when pageArg it specified, it turns page into a string, so it
fails again.

So then I tried

<#assign page = pageArg?number!1 />

but that fails because when pageArg is null, pageArg?number fails.

So my next theory was to use #if, which takes me back to

<#assign page><#if
pageArg?is_defined>${pageArg?number}<#else>1</#if></#assign>
but I can see already that would fail beacuse of [1] above.  

That leaves
<#assign page = 1 >
<#if pageArg?is_defined>
  <#assign page = pageArg?number}
</#assign>

This seems a bit cumbersome.

Is there some special syntax I'm missing for defaulting numeric values
from optional strings?!?!

Leigh.



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