Tony Proctor wrote: > "Steve Hayes" <hayesstw@telkomsa.net> wrote in message > news:h4p6i8l277lgaqsbl8ad70jkek4injed62@4ax.com... >> On Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:02:25 +0000, Ian Goddard <goddai01@hotmail.co.uk> >> wrote: >> >> I think you are being too dismissive. >> >> I'm not taking about XML files, but about Gedcom files, and I'm not >> talking >> about a DOM, but about AWK. >> >> And I'm not taking about some hypothetical Platonic ideal of the perfect >> Gedcom replacement, but about the actual Gedcom files that millions of >> genealogists have on their computers now. >> >> These "you can't get there from here" comments are really not very >> helpful. >> >> > > I gave advice based on experience Steve. For every AWK file you write, I can > contrive a GEDCOM example that will break it. Another post in this thread > mentioned ambiguities, and having to assume the availability of special > characters that won't occur in names or notes. The simplest approach to awkward corner cases is probably to just use an interactive editor - notepad, vi, emacs or whatever. There used to be an old saw along the lines of don't use C if you can use awk, don't use awk if you can use sed etc. Nowadays I suppose perl & python would have to be thrown in somewhere (although there might be a case for saying don't use perl if you can use C ;) The principle being that there's a trade-off between the simplicity of expression of your requirement and the scope of the tool. If the problem is within the scope of, say, tr, there's no point in risking screwing up when using something more advanced but trickier to address. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk