* Map Life Facts question regarding use of brackets

[BillH]

Awhile back I started using the [[ ]] method of adding a town and state to my addresses in order to be able to tell them apart more easily.

For example: Providence Cemetery,,,, [[Hedgesville, West Virginia]]

The Place value for this location is: Hedgesville, Berkeley County, West Virginia, USA

When using the [Address]~Place option of the plugin, it is unable to plot this. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking the plugin might just append these two values together like this, Providence Cemetery,,,, [[Hedgesville, West Virginia]], Hedgesville, Berkeley, West Virginia, USA, and then try to plot it?

In any case, once I remove the [[Hedgesville, West Virginia]] from the address so that it looks like this, Providence Cemetery,,,, Hedgesville, Berkeley, West Virginia, USA, it plots just fine.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to make Map Life Facts either understand this and plot it or a way to make it ignore the [[Hedgesville, West Virginia]]?

Thanks

[tatewise]

Some users employ the [[ ... ]] format in Address fields so that part is automatically excluded in Reports to avoid duplication with Place field contents.

The Plugin currently excludes any part enclosed in " string quotes ".

So this seems to work which combines the two mechanisms:
Providence Cemetery,,,, [["Hedgesville, West Virginia"]], Hedgesville, Berkeley, West Virginia, USA

If you don't need the [[ ... ]] brackets then you could remove them too.

The Search and Replace Plugin on just the Address fields should make whichever change you want.

What I could do in the next version of the Plugin is to exclude any part enclosed in [[ brackets ]].

[BillH]

Mike,

I use the [[]] format to do both. Allow me to easily identify which place a particular address applies to and also to exclude the duplication in reports.

I will go ahead and use the [[""]] mechanism you mention, but it would be nice if you could add the feature of ignoring anything in [[]] in a future release.

I used the Search and Replace Plugin and it worked fine for changing [[ to [[". However when I try to change ]] to "]] it doesn't find anything to change even though the ]] is still on those addresses. Any ideas what I need to do to change those?

Thanks

[tatewise]

Make sure you have selected Part Words.

OR try that attached Map Life Facts Plugin Version 3.9.1 ZIP file that needs extracting, and handles [[ ... ]]

[ATTACHMENT deleted as now in Plugin Store.]

[BillH]

Mike,

The plugin works great. Thanks!

OK... you have to explain something to me. Why would Search and Replace change [[ to [[" with Whole Word selected, but it won't change ]] to "]]?

[tatewise]

Bill, that is a very good question, and I was looking for the answer too.

The Plugin is designed to detect search strings that are entirely white space and punctuation characters (such as [[ and ]]).
For those, it automatically forces Part Words search mode, because they are NOT words.
This is because the Whole Words search strategy treats such white space and punctuation as word delimiters and makes no sense when the search string is itself that same set of characters.

It turns out there is a flaw in the Lua Pattern match I use to detect white space and punctuation characters.
It matches most OK, but ] and a few others are not correctly detected as punctuation.
It is my fault, and should have gone through and checked every single punctuation character.
I checked a handful and assumed the rest would be OK. Sorry!

I have a fix that will be in the next version of the Plugin, but it is a minor problem, with the workaround of explicitly setting Part Words search mode.

[BillH]

Mike,

No problem, no reason to be sorry. I just couldn't figure it out. No hurry on a fix.

Thanks!