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

[John Ralls]

It is indeed. What the tooltip is trying to say is that you can enter any single character except a letter or a number or you can enter one of the listed strings and GnuCash will convert the string to the corresponding character. "dash" really means "hyphen" (U+002d), but regardless that conflicts with the hard-coded account names including imbalance, orphaned gains, and trading accounts.

We can't change the hard-coded account names without breaking existing books, which is too bad. Using one of the dash characters (U+2013 or U+2014) would have been a better design choice as it requires special effort to enter one from most keyboards. I'm afraid the only solution is to make U+002d an illegal separator character and to remove "dash" from the interpreted strings.

The hiding message box is mostly a mac problem, the fix is to make it "transient for" the preferences window.

Regards,
John Ralls



> On Jul 23, 2019, at 10:26 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> But "colon" is the default!
> 
> Colin
> 
> On Tue, 23 Jul 2019, 18:16 Adrien Monteleone, <
> adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> 
>> I’m using 3.6 on MacOS.
>> 
>> It says, emphasis mine:
>> 
>> A legal value is any single character EXCEPT letters and numbers, or any
>> of the following strings: “colon” “slash”, “backslash”, “dash” and “period”.
>> 
>> 
>> There are three missing commas in that list, but the intent is still
>> clear. The ‘or’ is extending the list of exceptions beyond just “letters
>> and numbers”.
>> 
>> 
>> It should probably read for clarity and grammar:
>> 
>> A legal value is any single character EXCEPT letters, numbers, “colon”,
>> “slash”, “backslash”, “dash”, and “period”.
>> 
>> Thus, you cannot use:
>> 
>> letters
>> numbers
>> colon
>> slash
>> backslash
>> dash
>> period
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Adrien
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 23, 2019, at 11:39 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 17:18, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> The tooltip on my Mac version of GC 3.5 specifically includes “dash” as
>> one of the legal options.
>>> 
>>> Same with 3.6 on Ubuntu.  The tooltip says "dash" is allowed.  I guess
>>> that is a bug.
>>> 
>>> Colin
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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