Punctuation before and after Endnote citations

Hi all,
Does anyone know if there is a way to automatically move punctuation before or after an Endnote citation in Microsoft Word?

Some formatting styles require the punctuation to come before the Endnote citation, eg " .[1, 2]", or " ,[1, 2]" and some require it after the punctuation eg “[1,2].” or “[1,2];”.

This is not a large problem with a small amount of text, but when you have to change the punctuation in an entire document from one format to the other with submission to one journal and then another, it becomes an frustrating endeavour. 
As this regularly drives me crazy, and it is one of the few things I have never been able to figure out how to get Endnote to help me with, I would love to be able to find a solution!  Can anyone help?

Thank you.

I have no idea what you mean. Can you give us an example of instructions that would dictate the position of punctuation in relation to citations?  

– but the short answer is, I doubt that the Endnote software is going to help with this.  

It seems for this to work there has to be two citation templates (each having either a period or a comma) working simultaneously and this can’t be done in EndNote.

 

However, if you convert your final document to a text file to remove EndNote field codes it’s possible to create a macro in MS Word to automate searching and placing the punctuation either before or after the bracketed citation. Or instead of a macro you can just use Search and Replace.

You can search and replace using regular expressions in Word after converting to unformatted citations.

e.g. the following will change .{reference} to {reference}.

Find what:  .({*})

Replace with:   \1.