Single excluded date - a question

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John Cordes

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Feb 8, 2026, 2:27:53 PMFeb 8
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John,

 In T2G v2.00, in the Database section, the box for Include Single-excluded Data is unchecked.

 In the Death tag for individual #11751 there is a Memo in TMG which begins

================
-
Halifax Chronicle-Herald, October 1, 2011

CAMPBELL, George Allan -- 84, of Halifax, passed 
================

and in the Citations there is a CM which begins

================
-2024-10-05 had this in the memo (single excluded)
Halifax Chronicle-Herald, October 1, 2011
================

I don't normally have the obituary in two places like this, but it happens to be the case for this individual.

In the Tags section of T2G the Death Tag settings look like this:
Death    Shared event    No    Yes    Format memo    Omit

 The GEDCOM file for this individual begins like this:

0 @I11751@ INDI
1 SEX M
1 NAME George Allan /Campbell/
2 GIVN George Allan
2 SURN Campbell
1 FAMC @F4409@
1 FAMS @F4413@
1 BIRT
2 DATE ABT 1927
2 PLAC Halifax, Halifax County, Nova Scotia, Canada
3 MAP
4 LATI N44.654434
4 LONG W63.591616
1 DEAT
2 DATE 29 SEP 2011
2 PLAC Halifax, Halifax County, Nova Scotia, Canada
3 MAP
4 LATI N44.654434
4 LONG W63.591616
2 NOTE -
3 CONT Halifax Chronicle-Herald, October 1, 2011
3 CONT
3 CONT CAMPBELL, George Allan -- 84, of Halifax, passed away peacefully, September 29,
3 CONT 2011, in the Halifax Infirmary, QEII. Born in Halifax, he was the eldest son of


I'm wondering why the NOTE, converted from the Death Tag Memo I believe, is showing up in the GEDCOM file? What have I overlooked?

Thanks,
John Cordes


John Cardinal

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Feb 8, 2026, 3:06:38 PMFeb 8
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John,

 

Edit the Death tag in TMG and then choose “Show formatting codes” from the right-click context menu.

 

Are there any codes before the hyphen?

 

John Cardinal

 

Products: ORA, GedSite, Gedcom Publisher, Second Site, TMG Utility, TMG to GEDCOM

Web Hosting for Genealogists: Family History Hosting

John Cordes

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Feb 8, 2026, 5:41:40 PMFeb 8
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John,

 Thanks! That's the problem. That "-" is really

[COLOR:1,1,1,255,255,255]-[:COLOR]

 I'm doubly surprised because when I noticed the issue a while ago I deleted the 'apparent' "-" and again typed a hyphen. Do you know how this comes about? I'm sure I would not have manually entered those formatting codes. 

John


From: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of John Cardinal <jfcar...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:06 PM
To: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: [T2G] Single excluded date - a question

John,
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John Cordes

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Feb 8, 2026, 7:29:59 PMFeb 8
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A follow-up. I suppose I must have done a copy / paste operation somehow, from some formatted material. I wanted to find other possible occurrences of this so I did a search for "2 NOTE -" (without the quotes) with the gedcom file open in a text editor. Two other instances turned up, which I 'fixed' by opening those individuals in TMG and using the 'Show formatting codes' option.

John Cordes

From: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of John Cordes <John....@Dal.Ca>
Sent: Sunday, February 8, 2026 6:41 PM
To: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [T2G] Single excluded date - a question
 

John Cardinal

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Feb 8, 2026, 8:54:21 PMFeb 8
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John,

 

You can use TMG Utility to find any other memos that begin with “[COLOR”.

John Cordes

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Feb 8, 2026, 9:06:56 PMFeb 8
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John,

 Ah, yes, that's great. I've just looked into it, setting "Find what" to ^\[COLOR  and checking Use Pattern Matching. I've found a few more instances of the COLOR formatting code appearing. I don't think these ones are crucial for me but I think I'll clean them up anyway (on another day!).

Thanks,
John


From: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of John Cardinal <jfcar...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 8, 2026 9:54 PM

John,

Rod Deller

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Feb 9, 2026, 5:22:30 AM (14 days ago) Feb 9
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John.
I believe the single or double exclusion should be immediately before the text.
Try removing the dash text line then -Halifax Chronicle-Herald, October 1, 2011.

Rod
Fife, Scottland.

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John Cordes

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Feb 9, 2026, 7:46:24 AM (14 days ago) Feb 9
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Rod,
 
 Thanks for the suggestion. I was always under the impression that the exclusion marker needed to be the first character in the field - of a memo, say. I can try to test this out sometime later but I need to set off very soon for a few hours.

 I'm also a little unclear if you mean I could handle this without paying attention to any formatting codes, such as the [COLOR] one which was causing me problems. For quite a long time now whenever I paste material into a memo field I try to remember to choose the 'unformatted text' option, but I'm sure I sometimes forget to do this.

John Cordes


From: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Rod Deller <y.r.d...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 9, 2026 6:14 AM

To: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [T2G] Single excluded date - a question

John.

John Cardinal

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Feb 9, 2026, 9:17:24 AM (14 days ago) Feb 9
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Rod,

 

Re: “I believe the single or double exclusion should be immediately before the text.”

 

No, that’s not correct. The rule is the first character in the text must be a dash. That’s single-exclusion. For double-exclusion, the second character must also be a dash.

 

As John Cordes has confirmed, his first character was not a dash. The memo started with a printer code, “[COLOR…”, so the first character was “[“, and that’s not a dash, so the text weas not excluded. The printer code was not obvious in TMG and that led John astray. I guessed there was a printer code because the logic in my programs for handling excluded text is well-tested so the most likely issue was the first character was not a dash.

 

There is at least one exception. For multi-part memos, “part 1 || part 2 || etc.”, my software strips out spaces around the “||” characters, so both parts are single-excluded in “-part 1 ||-part 2” and in “-part 1 || -part 2”.

 

If you discover some cases where other arrangements seem to work, I strongly encourage you to ignore those cases and follow the rule I described above.

 

John Cardinal

 

Products: ORA, GedSite, Gedcom Publisher, Second Site, TMG Utility, TMG to GEDCOM

Web Hosting for Genealogists: Family History Hosting

 

From: t2...@googlegroups.com <t2...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Rod Deller
Sent: Monday, February 9, 2026 5:14 AM
To: t2...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [T2G] Single excluded date - a question

 

John.

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