How do you find numbers with a period

[lindal57129284]

FM - 2015 - Unstructured - Win 10

Using a Wildcard search, how do you find numbers with a period. Like 111.22 or 1.33 or 334566.9877665?

[Bob_Niland]

[0-9].[0-9]

with

☑ Use Wildcards

[Stefan-Gentz]

The example from Bob Niland (Error 7103) works for some of your examples, but not all. The results are a little bit unpredictable because of the "." which is a reserved character in RegEx. It will not always find the "." itself, and never the whole number.

To find always "one number+dot+one number" you will need to "escape" the dot with a backslash:

[0-9]\.[0-9]

This will find the following in your examples:

111.22

1.33

334566.9877665

If you want to find the whole number including the dot, you will need to add a "possessive quantifier". A possessive quantifier extends the search "As many times as possible, without giving back":

[0-9]++\.[0-9]++

This will find the following in your examples:

111.22

1.33

334566.9877665

A slightly more elegant version of the same is this:

\d++\.\d++

(\d is the shorthand character class for "digit")

Now, maybe you want to find and replace all these dot's with a comma? Easy: Just wrap the digit groups into a "numbered capturing group" by putting them into (brackets) Like this.

(\d++)\.(\d++)

Each of these (groups) will have an "internal" number: 1, 2 etc.

Now you can reference these groups in the "Change" text field with $# and replace the dot with a comma. Like this:

Find: (\d++)\.(\d++)

Change: $1,$2

This will find all of your examples and replace the "." in them with a ",".

Result:

111,22

1,33

334566,9877665

You might also find the post on the Adobe TechComm Blog by Marek Pawelec interesting: “Do the magic: Regular Expressions in FrameMaker”

Also, if you want to get deeper into RegEx, you might find the small tool "RegexBuddy" very helpful, to build complex regular expressions. It can be something extremely powerful!

Hope that helps 🙂