Number conversion with string streams

[Eugene]

I'm working on a program which needs to convert a string to various data
types. I created a function using string streams and templates to do just
that:

template<typena me T>
bool StringToNumber( string & s, T & number)
{
istringstream iss(s);

iss >> number;

return !iss.fail();
}

This function works great. It even checks the magnitude of the number in
the string and fails if the string number is too big to fit into the given
datatype.
Here's the problem: It converts chars differently than other types.
Example:
string s = "123";
char num;
StringToNumber( s, num); // num == '1'

How can I get the function to convert "123" into the number 123 not the
character '1' while still checking the magnitude so that a string like "500"
will fail to convert into a char.

Thanks.