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

[Michael Hendry]

> On 24 Jul 2019, at 05:38, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jul 23, 2019, at 11:15 AM, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 23 Jul 2019, at 18:55, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> I’m not sure what this last sentence means - were you referring to the start-up message that warns of the presence of a hyphen in an account-name that GC has created, e.g. Imbalance-GBP?
>> 
>> I can accept that this might be a Mac problem, but what does this have to do with the preferences window - which isn’t in use on start-up, and can’t be accessed until the message is closed?
>> 
>> Here is a screenshot taken after I’d deliberately entered an unbalanced transaction, closed GC and then re-opened it. I had to reduce the width of the Accounts Window to see the warning.
>> 
>> https://www.dropbox.com/s/glxivc5732xg33n/Screenshot%202019-07-23%2019.10.19.png?dl=0
> 
> Sorry, I misunderstood when you were seeing the dialog.
> 
> It appears to be set "transient for" the splash screen. I think that's right, but it should also  block opening the main window until you dismiss it. That wouldn't be mac-only.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls

Thanks, John.

I’ve posted a bug report.

Regards,

Michael