LifeLines Users Guide

Version 3.0.2

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Character Translation

When you choose the modify character translation tables operation from the main menu, LifeLines displays the character translation menu:

Which character mapping do you want to edit?
   e  Editor to Internal mapping
   m  Internal to Editor mapping
   i  GEDCOM to Internal mapping
   x  Internal to GEDCOM mapping
   d  Internal to Display mapping
   r  Internal to Report mapping
   q  Return to main men

LifeLines has little built-in knowledge of character codes. If you use 7-bit ASCII characters you will not encounter problems. However, many European and other languages require additional characters, and there are many 8-bit and other schemes for encoding those characters. LifeLines knows about none of them. However, LifeLines provides a few character translation features you can use to help manage character translation.

LifeLines provides facilities for mapping between characters whenever a data record changes form. LifeLines supports four forms:

• internal - for records in the database
• editor - for records being edited
• display - for records being displayed
• report - for records written to output files

When converting text from one form to another LifeLines normally does not convert characters codes. You may, however, override this default behavior by creating translation tables for LifeLines to use when converting between forms. There are six translation tables you may define. The following lists the six tables and describes when they are applied:

internal to editor

when converting from internal, database form to editor form

editor to internal

when converting from editor form back to internal, database form

GEDCOM to internal

when reading GEDCOM input records and writing them to database

internal to GEDCOM

when writing internal database records to external GEDCOM file

internal to display

when displaying a record in a browsing mode display screen

internal to report

when writing internal database records to external report file

After you select a translation table you are placed in your screen editor to edit the table. Translation tables are made up of lines that look like:

pattern pattern

where a tab separates the two patterns. Each pattern is an arbitrary sequence of verbatim ASCII characters and escape sequences. Translation occurs by finding all occurrences that match left patterns and replacing them with the corresponding right patterns.

There are four escape mechanisms used in patterns:

  #nnn  nnn is a decimal character value
  $hh   hh is a hexadecimal character value
  \#    represents the # character
  \$    represents the $ character
  \\    represents the \ character

The character translation feature is not fully tested, and not all translations are currentlyimplemented.

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