Find/Replace for Citations

[JamesWinfrey]

My source citations are a mess after years of changing genealogy programs. Major problems are word run ons, strings of characters (", , , "), repetition of details, etc. I played around with the Find Citation Details in the Sources tools but that will take me weeks to fix all of them. Is there a Find/Replace function where I could change something like ", [Q:3], [Q:3], [Q:3]" to " " everywhere it is used in one operation?

Thanks,

Jim

[ttl]

Re: Find/Replace for Citations

If the offending strings are in the body of your source, the Find and Replace button at the bottom of the Find panel should do what you want. This won't work if the text is contained in a person's source detail field, and I have nothing to offer on that.

[sgtbob]

Re: Find/Replace for Citations

I have a similar situation with respect to place holder commas that were in the previous program I was using, particularly for geographic locations. The GEDCOM seems to have brought over locations as ',,,USA' where the commas represented City, County and State in that order. It doesn't seem to affect anything except when viewing the 'events' the superfluous commas appear in the 'place' column. Is there a way to remove those commas?

[riwebb]

Re: Find/Replace for Citations

If the offending strings are in the body of your source, the Find and Replace button at the bottom of the Find panel should do what you want. This won't work if the text is contained in a person's source detail field, and I have nothing to offer on that.

Thank you! I was just looking for this today and this was the top item in the forum. Service before you ask (shucks, service before you even search)!

[ttl]

Re: Find/Replace for Citations

I have a similar situation with respect to place holder commas that were in the previous program I was using, particularly for geographic locations. The GEDCOM seems to have brought over locations as ',,,USA' where the commas represented City, County and State in that order. It doesn't seem to affect anything except when viewing the 'events' the superfluous commas appear in the 'place' column. Is there a way to remove those commas?

There is an option in the GEDCOM import window to remove the extraneous commas when the data is initially imported. This would be the easiest way to deal with the issue, but if it's going to be too difficult to reaccomplish the import, you can use Find and Replace to search on two, three, (or four?) commas and replace them with one (or nothing). Specify Places to limit the damage, and you might want to experiment on a copy of your working file to ensure you don't do anything irrevocably harmful to your data.