Find & Replace to insert thousands separators

Question

In MS Word I'm looking for the best way to use wildcard F&R to insert thousands separators (in this case an unbreaking space) wherever appropriate. The numbers in which they need to be inserted will be all be between four and six digits in length, sometime followed by a decimal point, sometimes just by a space, or the number may just appear on its own in a table cell. I will avoid using  "Replace all" to make sure that dates will not be affected.

Answer 1

You could use a wildcard Find/Replace, where:

Find = ([!/-//][0-9])([0-9]{3})>

Replace = \1,\2

or, for replacement with non-breaking spaces:

Replace = \1^s\2

The above expression will ignore dates formatted with / or - separators.

Answer 2

Thanks very much, Paul. That did the trick.

The bit I was not familiar with was the ">" - which made the difference. Now I know that "end of word" also works for numbers.