[GNC] Use of "dash" as a Separator Character

[Adrien Monteleone]

While the creation of those accounts on the fly is probably hard coded to use a dash, what if you created them yourself and used a different spacer in the name, then change your separator character of choice?

Options might be ‘Imbalance_GBP’ or 'Imbalance–GBP’ or ‘Imbalance—GBP’.

Those last two might look exactly like ‘Imbalance-GBP’ depending on your e-mail client’s text settings, but they are an en-dash and em-dash respectively, not hyphens. If your keyboard layout is set to ‘Macintosh’ you should be able to generate those by using OPT- and SHIFT+OPT- respectively.

First change the account separator back to the default, then edit the names of those accounts, then change the separator to what you want.

Then create a test transaction that should attempt to create the Imbalance or Orphan accounts and see if it uses the ones you renamed, or creates new ones with dashes instead.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jul 23, 2019, at 6:19 AM, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I’ve tried using “dash” as account separator, as it’s easily accessible with my left little finger without the need for me to press the shift key (as is the case with the colon).
> 
> Unfortunately, when I create and unbalanced or orphan transaction, GnuCash creates a new account (Imbalance-GBP or Orphan-GBP) which breaks the rule that the separator can’t be used as part of an account name.
> 
> This is OK until the account is closed and re-opened, when GnuCash appears to have hung, with the Gnucash title-bar bereft of any menu options, and the Main Window unresponsive.
> 
> I discovered accidentally that the GnuCash splash screen and a dialogue box warning of the use of the separator character had been obscured by the Main GnuCash window.
> 
> The latter may be a Mac OS issue (I’m using GC version 3.5 on an iMac with OS X High Sierra.
> 
> I haven’t found reference to these issues in the bug list - are they sufficient to warrant notification?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael