Michael J. Hannah wrote: > Tom Fulton asked: >> I am trying to have TMGU insert a space in a citation detail field... Okay, Tom, I finally figured out how to do this. Do not use "Change Citation Parts" in TMGU. Instead use "Find and Replace". Field to change: Citation Detail Find what: "^(.*)\|\|\|\|(.*)" (without the surrounding quotes) Replace with: "$1|| ||$2" (without the surrounding quotes) Check only the box for "Use Pattern Matching". Run this as many times as necessary so that the log output for TMGU shows it is no longer making any changes in any Citation Detail. >> The reasons I want a space in CD4 are... Yes, Tom, thanks to you forwarding your templates I now see the same behavior. As best I can make out without exhaustive testing it seems that TMG is treating the four vertical bars as if they were *six* vertical bars??? So, for example, if CD3 is empty without a space, TMG does not output CD3, but also! does not output CD4, and then puts the text for CD4 in CD5's output, and the text for CD5 in CD6's output!!! This is really bizarre, and I will need to do more testing before I include it in my "Outstanding Bugs" on-line document. There may be other conditions that cause even more bizarre behavior when a 'place holder' space is not used in an empty split part. To be fair, TMG HELP has said for some time in the "Empty Split Citation Detail and Citation Memo Field Parts" section of the "Citation (Existing)" topic: "If you use multiple split memo parts, you should always use a 'place holder' space in any empty memo parts." So bizarre behavior where the spaces are missing I guess should not be totally unexpected. Hope this helps, Michael

Tom and Michael, The Change Citation Parts feature in TMGU prevents the creation of CD parts that have a single space because the official TMG rule is that spaces aren't significant in split memo fields. If I recall correctly, after TMGU evaluates the Change Citation Part actions for a particular citation, it inspects the part values and any parts that contain only spaces are emptied. Michael has suggested a method that allows TMGU to create spaces in CDn values using Find and Replace. The same basic method would work with Change Citation Parts, but using the "Change Detail" rather than "Change Detail4" or one of the other split-part-changing actions. However, I don't think the workaround is how to proceed. That's treating a symptom. Instead, we need to determine why Tom sees the unusual results where a space in an otherwise empty CD4 appears to affect the use of CD5, etc. As far as I know, there is no such rule in TMG. I can't explain why Tom sees the results he sees, but I don't have time to experiment right now. I know that in the past TMG had trouble parsing successive split memo parts unless there was a space for each "skipped" part, but I thought those bugs were fixed a long time ago. John