* @ character in Notes and and Addresses

[admin]

Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 10:33:07 +0100
We have discovered a Family Historian bug which we think you should be aware of. It occurs in Notes and Addresses. You can have an @ char in the first 240 characters of the first paragraph of a Note or Address, without problems. But if it occurs any later than that, or if its not in the first paragraph, it will cause problems.
Essentially what happens is that whenever you save the file, each @ character is doubled when written out to the file. This is strictly-speaking correct suprisingly enough. GEDCOM requires that @ chars be doubled in this way when written out to GEDCOM files. However, it should then be undoubled when the file is read in again, and that is what is not happening. For those who are familiar with GEDCOM, the problem only occurs if the @ character is on a line that begins with a CONT or CONC tag.
The practical effect, if you were effected by this bug, is that you would find your GEDCOM file starting to get bigger and bigger and slower and slower to load. If this happens, the easiest solution is to use an editor like WordPad and search for any occurrence of 3 or more @ chars in a row. 3 is a good number because you might get 2 together quite validly, but you're not likely to get 3 in a row validly. Wherever you find @ chars, using this search, within a CONT or CONC line, you should delete them all (delete the entire line if it contains nothing but @ chars). If you need the @ char in a Note, you should either make sure it is right at the start of the note, or alternatively, replace it with some other code for now, until the problem is fixed (e.g. use (at) to represent the @ char).
Needless to say the problem will be fixed in 2.1.
We apologise for this bug, and hope it doesn't affect too many of you.
Best wishes
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer

The fix for this can be downloaded at
FH Copy and Correct

[Phil_L]

A GEDCOM of three to four hundred basic entries will store in less than a hundred KBytes. So half a dozen sessions of work can be backed-up on an OLD (750K) floppy.
1/ I am hoping Ver 2.x will have auto back-up.
2/ And to go with (1), incremental 'undo' [ctl+Z].

Cheers Phil L