Delimiters within a field ...

[jeffd2651]

This may be a silly question but as a relative novice to spreadsheets I'm having a bit of a problem.
I have a spreadsheet which I need to save as a .csv file so that I can upload it to an online application ... but the online application requires the .csv to use commas (,) as the field delimiters.
In order to achieve this and retain the continuity within the address fields, I've changed the commas within the postal address data to hyphens (-) ... and that did the trick ... everything uploaded OK.
However, now I have one small issue; where people are using double barrelled names (for example, Jones-Wilkins as their surname) or if there is a negative value in one of the fields (i.e. -0.1) ... how do I stop the hyphen within each field as being read as a delimiter ????

Many thanks

 

[jasonb75]

There isn't going to be a realistic way to distinguish between hyphens of different purposes, perhaps a better idea would be to replace the address commas with semicolons or underscores?

If, by chance you left a space after each hyphen that you used to replace a comma, while pre-existing hyphens did not have a space, then you could use that to aid replacing "- " with "; " but other than that, I don't think that you will have any success. As a delimiter you can only use a single character, not a pair.

 

[jeffd2651]

There isn't going to be a realistic way to distinguish between hyphens of different purposes, perhaps a better idea would be to replace the address commas with semicolons or underscores?

If, by chance you left a space after each hyphen that you used to replace a comma, while pre-existing hyphens did not have a space, then you could use that to aid replacing "- " with "; " but other than that, I don't think that you will have any success. As a delimiter you can only use a single character, not a pair.

Thanks