Comments

[johnbedford]

recently, I installed ifamily after having used reunion, and transferred my existing records using gedcom. The file is fairly large (over 16000 individuals) and in the comments section of each individual a piece of code, probably about 30 digits long, is printed. I can see no loss of data to account for this code, and the only way I can see to delete this is by deleting each one, one at a time. This will take a very long time. Is there any way I can clear the comments section of all records at one time.
John Bedford

[jke98226]

Have you tried the "Delete all Comments Lines that Contain the Filter String"? I haven't used it, but it seems to describe what you want to do. It's under "People -> Comments..." and at the bottom of the dialog box.

I hope this help.
Jon

[johnbedford]

Thanks for the tip, but I have already tried that, but each string is different

John Bedford

[moose45]

Sound like the ideal candidate for a text editor that can handle regular expressions.

A gedcom file is just formatted text after all.

There are loads of text editors that allow you to do a "find and replace" based on a regular expression. This include the free editor jedit http://www.jedit.org.

Using that tool if you wanted to search and replace a 29-character long number string you would use the following [0-9]{29}

There's a great guide to regular expressions at http://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html

I'm sure with a little playing you could work out how to delete what you want without touching the rest.

As with everything, take a backup, then take another one before working on your data!

[johnbedford]

Thanks for that, I will try that and see what happens
Cheers John Bedford