# How to avoid confusion between special characters and delimiters or separators? [closed]

Some countries use , instead of . in a decimal. Unfortunately, a 2D coordinate, for example (2,3,4), becomes ambiguous for readers.

How to avoid this?

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## closed as off topic by Lev Bishop, Caramdir, Jake, lockstep, Joseph Wright♦Jun 10 '11 at 6:18

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a semicolon? perhaps –  Yan Zhou Jun 10 '11 at 0:24
Brazil uses colon as a decimal separator. We are told to use a semicolon when dealing with non-integer coordinates, e.g. (1,5 ; 2,5). EDIT: In some cases, people suppress the value separator, e.g. (1,5 2,5). –  Paulo Cereda Jun 10 '11 at 0:41
This seems off-topic for this site. –  Lev Bishop Jun 10 '11 at 1:54
@Altermundus: have you tried \ensuremath{\cdot} command? –  Crowley Jun 10 '11 at 5:10
@Caramdir Yes I think it would be preferable to reformulate the question : Something like How to avoid confusion between special characters and delimiters or separators –  Alain Matthes Jun 10 '11 at 6:13

The only case where this question is not off-topic is the case where someone like a french tex's user tries to use a list for example in a \foreach list. When the ,is a separator you need to hide your math , inside a tex group {...}
\foreach \n in {1,2,{2,718},3,{3,14}}

Now it's possible with the package numprint with babel and with siunitxto write numbers with dot and when you need to print the numbers to get the good syntax according to the country.