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dorisw

TMGU Find/Replace - Reposting

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Is there a way to target the Name field to remove the asterisk I have attached to the first name of every immigrant in my database? It is interfering with the matching algorithms at Ancestry, MyHeritage, etc.  Or is there some other way to accomplish this?

Thank you.

Doris

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Thanks, svhous. I have done that, but I'm trying to remove an asterisk from the names of these people. TMGU doesn't seem to have that feature, unless I'm missing something.

Doris

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Doris,

Do you still need help with this? I don't check the Forum every day, and without that habit, I sometimes skip multiple weeks.

Yes, you can remove a trailing "*" from a name part such as the given name. You use Change Name Parts to do it. Changing a "*" is a little more difficult than changing other characters because "*" has a special meaning in the pattern-based replace operation, and that's what you need to use. You have to "escape" the "*" character so that it does not have its special meaning.

I changed one person in a TMG project to have a trailing "*" in the given name of her primary name. She had a couple non-primary names that were using the same given name, for a total of three names that needed fixing. Here is the TMG Utility log that shows the Change Name Part rules and the resulting changes:

TMG Utility v7.3.7
Copyright (C) 1999-2016 by John Cardinal. All Rights Reserved. Do not redistribute.

Function=Change Name Parts
Project=test09
Started at 16:57:29

Options:
  Match case: False
  Show All Name Fields: False
  Flag Filter: <No Filter>

Rules:
If GivenName ends with "*"
Change GivenName replace pattern "\*$" with ""

ID, Old Name, New Name
#3, 'Mary* Millet', 'Mary Millet'
#3, 'Mrs. Mary* Bezanson (Millet)', 'Mrs. Mary Bezanson (Millet)'
#3, 'Mrs. Mary* Vaughan (Millet)', 'Mrs. Mary Vaughan (Millet)'

Finished at 16:57:32
Elapsed Time=3 seconds
People=24,849
Names read=33,072
If GivenName ends with "*" = 3
Names changed=3

If you have any questions, contact me. It's probably best to contact me via email...

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Thank you, John, as always! This worked like a charm and saved me gobs of time and probably lots of oversights.

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