Account name length

[Luciano]

Hi Martin,

Quick question. Is there a reason why account and commodity names need to be at least two characters? 

Does it make parsing easier or is it just a matter of preference?

I have some holdings of stock with single letter tickers and it'd be nice to use their actual tickers in account and commodity names.

Obviously not a big deal, just a minor annoyance, but if it's a trivial change to the grammar I'd welcome it.

I'll dig into the codebase at some point but I'm just now learning Python so it might be a while.

Regards,

Luciano 

[Alan Post]

Hello Martin,

My name is Alan Post. I subscribed to the list shortly after starting
to use beancount. This is my first post. I would use this feature too;
Please excuse my laziness in not checking the source code, but if I
had to guess it's that you want to restrict account names to starting
with a ~letter, permit things like numbers in the second position, and
match one or more rather than zero or more characters. Roughly the code
behaves like:

[a-z][a-z0-9]+

rather than:

[a-z][a-z0-9]*

If it is that easy and you think this kind of change is acceptable, I'd
be happy to try my hand at producing a patch. (I know the details in
the code may be whelmingly different; I'm going for brevity over email)
I will obviously be pleased just to have the feature if you don't want
to try coordinating such a change.

Thank you for considering Luciano's request, and for beancount,

-A

[Martin Blais]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the limitation is related to the lexer.

The grammar for flags plays not to nicely with other things, and I think this is one of them.

However, I think I _may_ be able to change the definition to that of Alan's suggestion for account name components beyond the first one.

https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/issues/138/make-it-possible-to-use-account-names-with

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[Martin Blais]

Looks like that works.

Try it.