On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Sébastien Brisard wrote:

> Thanks Charles for this answer. Let me state the problem more clearly.
> Number-like cells *are* converted to numbers (as best illustrated by
> the example below (see the use of numberp), which might incur accuracy
> loss (see below, the first row has a lot of significant digits).
> I am not interested in the number representation of these cells, only
> the string matters for my application. Due to this accuracy loss,
> converting back the number to a string is not an option for me...
>
> Any ideas? Thanks!

The usual resolution of table references will eventually use
`org-babel--string-to-number' to do what its name suggests.

You can write an elisp function to handle references as you wish and call 
them from :var arguments.

A hackish way to do this for your case is to quash the action of 
`org-babel--string-to-number':

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
   (defun get-ref-strings-as-is (ref)
     (cl-letf (((symbol-function 'org-babel--string-to-number)
 	       (lambda (x) x)))
       (org-babel-ref-resolve ref)))
#+END_SRC

#+header: :var table=(get-ref-strings-as-is "table20170119") 
#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :colnames yes :results pp
table
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: (("row1" "12345678901234567890")
:  ("row2" "a")
:  ("row3" "b")
:  ("row4" "c"))

You can look at `org-babel-ref-resolve' to get some ideas on how to do 
this more artfully.

> Sébastien
>
> ===== begin example =====
> #+NAME: table20170119
> | col1 | col2                 |
> |------+----------------------|
> | row1 | 12345678901234567890 |
> | row2 | a                    |
> | row3 | b                    |
> | row4 | c                    |
>

HTH,

Chuck