is there a macro or program to quickly add notes to every person is gedcom?

[michelle hansen]

I received a gedcom with appx. 300 individuals. I want to add a person
note to every single individual that says "obtained from ..." Is that
possible? Or do I have to manually add? That would be a pain in the
butt. LOL

michelle hansen <jeffs...@yahoo.com>

[Joe Makowiec]

> I received a gedcom with appx. 300 individuals. I want to add a
> person note to every single individual that says "obtained from ..."
> Is that possible? Or do I have to manually add? That would be a pain
> in the butt.
>

> Michelle Hansen


There are plenty of ways. The Master Genealogist, for example, will allow you
to do exactly what you want - add a note to every record in a gedcom on
import.

Another method, applicable across genealogy programs, depends on how
conversant you are with text search/replace. You'd need a program which
supports 'regular expression'[1] searching and replacing. I use notepad++[2],
which is free and has extremely powerful search facilities.

In this case, it would be relatively simple: each individual begins with a
line like

0 @I3215@ INDI

You would do a search for "^(0 .* INDI)$" (without the quotes) and replace it
with "\1\n1 SOUR @S999@" (again sans quotes). It's less scary than it seems;
translated, it means:
Search from the beginning of the line (^) for 0 followed by a space followed
by any number of characters (.*) followed by INDI at the end of the line.
Since all that is surrounded by parentheses (), you can refer to it in the
replace expression. The replace is the stuff we found in the search (\1)
followed by a newline (\n), followed by a source (1 SOUR @S999@). You could
also use a note (1 NOTE Imported from GEDCOM newstuff.ged on 10 Jun 2012). If
you wanted to apply this to every item in the GEDCOM (individuals, families,
sources, repos), you could search for "^(0 .*)$" (ie any line which begins
with '0'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
http://www.regular-expressions.info/

[2] http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ ; others are available


--
Joe Makowiec
http://makowiec.org/
Email: http://makowiec.org/contact/?Joe
Usenet Improvement Project: http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

Joe Makowiec <mako...@invalid.invalid>

[Steve Hayes]

If you use Legacy, you can import it and add a source note to every record in
the file.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net>

[Wes Groleau]

> I received a gedcom with appx. 300 individuals. I want to add a person
> note to every single individual that says "obtained from ..." Is that
> possible? Or do I have to manually add? That would be a pain in the
> butt. LOL
>

> Michelle Hansen


Details missing.

If you use webtrees, use the batch update feature

If you have Microsoft word, use the replace:

In the find box, put
@ INDI^p

In the replace box, put
@ INDI^p1 NOTE Obtained from ....

Click replace all

Save as text file (*.txt)

Rename the file to remove the .txt that got stuck on the end

If you have perl

perl -p -i -e \
's:\@ INDI:\@ INDI\n1 NOTE Obtained from Jane:g;' \
gedcomfile.ged

no doubt tons of other ways to do it, depending on what you have available.


--
Wes Groleau

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”
— Thomas Jefferson

Wes Groleau <Grolea...@FreeShell.org>