Numeric values with German “comma”

[Susanne]

Hi, in German “5.2” is separated by a comma: “5,2”. But at the moment, CODAP interprets this as categorial. Is there a possibility to teach CODAP that for the German version the “comma” has the meaning of “dot”? (So that a mean can be computed for example)

Susanne

[Jonathan Sandoe]

Hi Suzanne,

I am sorry that CODAP is not more capable in this area. Handling the comma decimal separator better has long been on our list.

You may already know this, but there is a workaround for this. It’s a bit of a hassle. You can create a new attribute that has a formula that converts the comma separators to period decimal separators. Suppose you have a column, “nums”, with numbers with comma decimal separators. You can create a new attribute, “nums1”, and attach a formula to this column like, “replaceString(nums, ‘,’, ‘.’)”. This will convert the commas to periods. If you also have period grouping in your data (like 25.000,33) things are a little more complicated. The formula would be something like this: “replaceString(replaceString(nums, ‘.’, ”), ‘,’, ‘.’)”. This removes the existing periods before changing the commas to periods.

I know this is not ideal, Susanne. We’ll see if we can move this issue up a bit on our priority list.

Jonathan

[Kathy Shafer]

Susanne – You might try using Excel to manipulate the data. A search turned up a variety of ways to swap the comma in the text string to a dot in a numeric value. (Find and Replace worked with a number that did not already contain a decimal). I know this will add few more steps as you need to create the csv file to upload to CODAP. Good luck.

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