problems on percent target definition (comma)

[alagador]

Dear friends,

I am a newcommer to ConsNet. I have read in manual the possibility of
some bugs regarding commas on the percent target. I have made changes
to regional settings but I continue to get an error message when I
choose any of the predefined targets on the "percent target" window".
Anyone can give me an hint on how to overcome this issue?

Thanks in advance,

Diogo André Alagador
Biochange Lab, Madrid, Spain
Inst Sup Agronomia, Lisbon, Portugal

[Michael Ciarleglio]

Hi Diogo,

The root of this problem is that commas are not allowed in the names
of the target sets, but the Java "number formatter" will insert a
comma in some regions where commas are used as the decimal symbol. I
have done some further research on this issue and I will describe how
we adjusted the regional settings to avoid this problem.

One way that does work is to change your regional settings to Spanish
(Mexico), English (United States), or any system that uses the period
as the default decimal symbol.

One way that does NOT work is to "customize" the regional settings to
use the period rather than the comma as the decimal symbol. For
instance, I tried to alter the Spanish (Spain) regional setting to use
the decimal, and Java still formatted the numbers using a comma (which
causes the error).

If you do not want to change the regional settings of your computer,
we have put a patch for this problem in the newest version (ConsNet
v1_02) currently available on the website (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/
~consbio/Cons/consnet_home.html). Users who are experiencing
difficulty are invited to download this version, but it is not an
"essential" update. In addition, our solution was only a "patch",
which means that problems with the comma format could appear elsewhere
in the program. In particular, we use "comma separated value" files
to report some of the results. I will continue to look for other more
robust solutions. For now, the easiest way to resolve the problem is
to change your regional settings as described above.

Michael Ciarleglio