Replace text in Citation Detail?

[Kathy C]

I know how to do a Find and Replace but that does not seem to apply to Citation Details. Somehow, I've ended up with thousands of citations that include as a Detail, only the word "Pages." I don't know HOW it happened, but I'd sure like to fix it ..... if possible without visiting each citation to manually remove it.

So, is there a way to do this other than manually?

[Kathy C]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Does anyone have a reply or suggestion for this problem? Is there no way but to manually edit every entry to fix it?

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Does anyone have a reply or suggestion for this problem? Is there no way but to manually edit every entry to fix it?

Citation detail = memo.

If you do a find and replace and set "Where" to "Memos", I think it should do what you want.

As usual, you should probably try this out after making a backup, so you can recover if something goes wrong.

[Kathy C]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Citation detail = memo.

If you do a find and replace and set "Where" to "Memos", I think it should do what you want.

As usual, you should probably try this out after making a backup, so you can recover if something goes wrong.

Thanks for the reply, Dennis. I tried that but it does not work on the citation detail. In fact, it comes up with a disclaimer that "Source fields are not affected."

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Thanks for the reply, Dennis. I tried that but it does not work on the citation detail. In fact, it comes up with a disclaimer that "Source fields are not affected."

Bummer. I hope a better answer comes along, but I suspect it's going to be manual replacements...

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Thanks for the reply, Dennis. I tried that but it does not work on the citation detail. In fact, it comes up with a disclaimer that "Source fields are not affected."

Another thought: if it would be less problem than manual changes, you could export a GEDCOM, do a find and replace there, and reimport the GEDCOM.

[Kathy C]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Another thought: if it would be less problem than manual changes, you could export a GEDCOM, do a find and replace there, and reimport the GEDCOM.

Thank you, Dennis!! Great idea ..... and one I hadn't thought of, lol. I made a small gedcom from a few test people and tried editing it in TextEdit. That didn't turn out too well as that program could not differentiate between the PAGE gedcom tag and the word Page in the Detail field. BUT, TextWrangler can and that worked perfectly to get rid of the thousands of Page entries. Or, at least it will.... I just need to do some more tweaking to get the file how I want it before I make this change.

Thank you!!! BTW, do you know if the citation detail gedcom is supposed to be PAGE?

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

BTW, do you know if the citation detail gedcom is supposed to be PAGE?

I do not know. I can only recommend trial and error, which is what you're doing

Oftentimes it's easier if you can use Regex expressions (GREP, a sort of wildcard search) for find and replace; If you need any help with formulating the find and replace I could help there. Probably you need to do a multiline find. If you want to send me the text file with "Page" that you want changed and that you don't want changed I'd be happy to have a look at it.

[Kathy C]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

I do not know. I can only recommend trial and error, which is what you're doing

Oftentimes it's easier if you can use Regex expressions (GREP, a sort of wildcard search) for find and replace; If you need any help with formulating the find and replace I could help there. Probably you need to do a multiline find. If you want to send me the text file with "Page" that you want changed and that you don't want changed I'd be happy to have a look at it.

Thank you for the offer, but I managed to get it all done properly. As it turned out, I just had to do a find and replace on this: "PAGE Page" and replaced it with this: "PAGE" as the gedcom tag. Leaving the rest blank insured that it only deleted the word Page and left all occurrences such as "page 29." I'm a happy camper! You know, it found and deleted almost 8000 entries! Whew! Sure glad I didn't have to delete all those myself. Thanks for your help and great idea!

[Tom Robinson]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

Do be careful replacing existing data in your family file with info exported to a GEDCOM.

At least in Reunion 10, it wasn't possible to 'round trip' all the data. e.g. citation superscripts in note fields would move to the end of the field.

[Kathy C]

Re: Replace text in Citation Detail?

You're right, Tom. I've seen that before.