Changing the list separator character to TAB

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Guest

Does anyone know how to sèpecify the tab character as the list separator
(ASCII 9)?
 
Windows XP is an Operating system. Applications are programs, try
explaining what you are trying to do.
 
Ok. I wish to change the list separator character from the comma to the TAB
character. This character is (re)used by Excel when it exports/imports data
in text format, and in many other places. It is recommended that the List
Separator is not the same as the Decimal Separator, for obvious reasons.
Because Europeans use the comma as Decimal Separator, they usually choose the
semi-colon as the List Separator in their system...

You can change Windows List Separator in:

Start / Settings / Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Customize
/ Numbers tab / List Separator field.

As you may notice this field may contain up to 3 characters. What I wish is
to have a TAB character in there.

I just thought of changing it in the registry directly (you can enter binary
codes there) but I do not know the key...
 
Stefano Gatto said:
Ok. I wish to change the list separator character from the comma to the TAB
character. This character is (re)used by Excel when it exports/imports data
in text format, and in many other places. It is recommended that the List
Separator is not the same as the Decimal Separator, for obvious reasons.
Because Europeans use the comma as Decimal Separator, they usually choose the
semi-colon as the List Separator in their system...

You can change Windows List Separator in:

Start / Settings / Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Customize
/ Numbers tab / List Separator field.
Click to expand...

Have you tried

\t
 
In Excel, it is selected on a per file basis, and the Windows List
Separator "setting" has no effect. You Export a Tab delimited file ot
you Import and select Tab as the delimiter. Simple as that. For what
it's worth commas are used as both the thousands and the list separator
in the US, but if you truly want to change that in Regions then Open
Wordpad, insert a tab, copy it and paste it into Regional List separator
box.
 
I tried \t, but it uses ASCII 0 as delimiter, not ASCII 9.

Good to know this anyway.

Thank you for the suggestion.
 
It works! Many thanks.

To tell you the truth, I did not know what my colleague who asked for this
exactly wanted it for... Anyway the major drawback is that he will need to
use that same character to separate arguments in Excel functions... and just
this aspect may have fatal consequences. From my perspective this was
interesting enough per sè and I am going to tell my colleague to use the "TAB
delimited export" functionality in case this is what he wanted.

Note that your suggestion is perfect for the TAB character, but not for
other characters Wordpad would not handle, e.g. ASCII 00.
 
ASCII 00 ? You mean The NUL char. That would be Alt+000, but I doubt
that any document handling program would like that as content. That
would be more likely to be used for communication or data field content
as it represents "nothing". Anyway I am glad this solves your request.
You're welcome.
 
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