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Jean-Guy Marcil[_2_] Jean-Guy Marcil[_2_] is offline
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Default Easier way to change decimal and thousand separators

"Jay Freedman" wrote:

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:33:02 -0700, ElCagle
wrote:

Am translating a French document into English and having to change tons of
decimal separators (##,## into ##.##) and thousand separators (## ### ###,##
into ##,###,###.##).

There has to be an easy way to automate this. My macro knowledge is very
limited, but even with search and replace there has to be an easier way than
1, 2, 3, ... replace 1. 2. 3. ....

Thanks for your help


You can use wildcard replacement
(http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm) to do this more easily.

However, you need to do three replacements in order to get it done correctly.
The problem is that if you immediately change all the comma decimal separators
to periods, there won't be any way to tell them apart from the thousand
separators that are periods; if you change all periods in numbers to commas,
that will catch the decimal separators also.


Hi Jay,

I am not sure I understand, you write: "there won't be any way to tell them
apart from the thousand separators that are periods". But the thousand
separators in French are spaces, and usually, if the document is done right,
unbreakable spaces.

So, you can easily do this in two pases:

([0-9]),([0-9])
\1.\2

and

([0-9])[ ^s]([0-9])
\1,\2