Search and replace with Grep in BBEdit in a GEDCOM file

[marian]

Hello,

from the Windows genealogical application The Master Genealogist I exported a GEDCOM file where the places are in the form
Detail, City, County, State, Country
So I have such tags:
2 PLAC St. Remy Abbey, Reims, Marne département, Champagne-Ardennes région, France
but also
2 PLAC , Vienne, , , France
Reunion imports the second tag as Vienne, France

The problem I have is that I need this file imported back in The Master Genealogist and to verify (and change) events for more then 2300 people is a hard work.

I have here the application BBEdit and it can search and replace with Grep. I need a little help from somebody to find the search sentence for the lines which begin with 2 PLAC the empty places and a sentence to replace the empty places with something like "replaced by BBEdit" or so.

Perhaps can somebody help me for this.
Thank you very much,
Marian Boangiu

[MHill]

I'm no GREP expert, but I'd use three separate replaces. Here's what I came up with:

Perform 3 times (to change middle place fields):
Search: ^(2 PLAC )(.*), ,
Replace: \1\2, replaced by BBEdit,

Perform once (to change first place field):
Search: ^2 PLAC ,
Replace: 2 PLAC replaced by BBEdit,

Perform once (to change last place field):
Search: ^(2 PLAC )(.*),( *)\r
Replace: \1\2, replaced by BBEdit\r

I can't find a way to format this to show a monospaced font for the code (similar to the code html tag), so it's hard to see the spaces.

Obviously, if you decide to try my suggestion, use a copy of the original file. When I'm trying to figure out a GREP pattern, I undo right after the replace if it didn't do what I expected and I make a change and try again. Somebody else might post a better suggestion, but this is what I came up with.

After you've made your changes, you can use BBEdit to compare the original and modified files. (Search>Compare Two Front Documents)

Michael

[marian]

Thank you very much Michael!

It works very good.
Now I can replace in Reunion replaced by BBEdit with no letter and I have the places in the form I need to export back.

Thank you again,
Marian Boangiu