* Blank notes in exported gedcom

[peter5643]

I am currently exporting my FH gedcom to import into TNG 8. I have about 400 notes mainly related to individuals and I have editted the notes so that selective parts or all of a note are private with the [[ ]] facility and not exported. That works fine.

What I am finding however is that if I make all of a note private FH still exports a blank note and I am left with an exported gedcom with over 200 blank notes.

Is there an easy way to either prevent FH exporting blank notes in the first place or removing blank notes from the exported gedcom ?

I know I can remove the exported blank notes manually but it means that everytime I export my gedcom to update TNG 8 I will have to do a manual edit which is what I want to avoid at all costs.


ID:4870

[Jane]

Assuming these are Note Records, why not just open the exported file in FH and do a note query to find the blank ones and you can just select them all and delete them with one button press.

[peter5643]

Thanks for that Jane. I was coming to that kind of solution. I'll let you know the outcome when I have solved it

[peter5643]

As suggested I used a query to find the blank note fields in my exported gedcom file. Either of the two Custom Queries in the FHUG 'Downloads' section could be used on my file. ie

Individual Notes.fhq or
Find all People with Local Notes.fhq

By sorting on 'Note' on the query all the blank fields appeared together first in the query list and could therefore be easily deleted. There are however a few points worth mentioning.

1 To be safe I opened my exported gedcom file by right clicking it in Windows Explorer and opening it in FH rather than opening FH and opening the exported gedcom. By default when I open FH I always load my master gedcom file and this way my master is never opened and I can't edit it by mistake.

2. In the query the Individual and Note fields are displayed. When deleting, only highlight and delete the Note fields and NOT the Individuals as well.

3. In the Note field when the description is long it is often shown as an ellipsis ie (...). If eyes are dim (like mine) it is easy to think they are also blanks.

Thanks again for help !!