base 36

I hope this is the right area for this question which refers to the 'thread' field of the table 'comments'. I provide a non php solution to convert Wordpress data to Drupal. I recently became aware that the thread field is not a string of decimal numbers but is in fact a string of base 36 (Vancode) numbers. I've created the necessary functions to convert to and from base 36 format but I'm a little confused re - the leading digit/character.

Here is an excerpt from http://api.drupal.org/api/function/int2vancode/5

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