Created attachment 373342 [details] Mac crash report I had my account separator character set to "-" ("dash"), and was trying to export/import a number of accounts. When the import failed I decided to revert to the default ":" ("colon"), but when I went to Preferences-->Accounts and started to delete "dash", GC crashed, giving the attached report. I restarted GC (bypassing the warning about the lock file) and when I went back to Preferences-->Accounts the separator character field was empty. I was able to change this to "colon", and haven't had further problems.
the colon is generally preferred as a separator in contemporary text based accounting systems. a dash as a separator and a minus as negative number indicator are easily confused by less than ideal interpretations of our data files. triage: suggest close
I had chosen to use "dash" as a separator because I couldn't copy and paste from the heading of a report to use as a filename when saving the report as a PDF (colon being illegal in a filename). Rather than close the bug, suggest that "dash" be removed as an account separator option, otherwise someone else will fall into the same trap. A sensitive soul might think you were blaming the ignorant user for being so foolish as to do something that appears to be entirely legal.
you seem to be confused about legality. text accounting needs a consistent separator, got that? guess what? big commercial accounting systems have account seps too! so a colon is not illegal in a file name on all os's, so I can't support it being taken away. I can suggest you choose a name appropriate to your chosen operating system; if you do that no person has to fix anything for you. There is an element of the foolish user about this in the me-me:me;me sense :)
We seem to have got off on the wrong foot here. I'm not suggesting that "colon" should be abandoned as a separator character. What I am suggesting is that "dash" shouldn't be available as a separator character, because of the crash that happened when I tried to revert to "colon". As well as the potential for "dash" and "minus" to cause confusion in data files, which you mentioned, there's also the issue of the automatically-generated "Imbalance-GBP" and "Orphan-GBP" accounts, which appear when faulty transactions are entered in GC. If "dash" has been chosen as the account separator, an error message will be issued when GC is next started, warning that there are account names which include the separator. Unfortunately, several of the suggested separator characters (colon, backslash, slash and period) aren't acceptable on Mac or Windows systems, and I was creating report files to send to other people, which is why I went for the dash. My original report was about the crash which occurred when I tried to change back from "dash" to "colon" as a separator.
OK, in that case I think it'd be better if we met up in the user list rather than here
Michael, I guess you've forgotten that Wm is best ignored. He has no role in GnuCash development.
so many memories
Hi Michael Hendry, The quickfill code has been changed substantially recently (and I wasn't able to reproduce this in Linux master ~3.10, although I didn't try ~very~ hard). Assuming you are unable to build a master version on Mac OS, would you be able to test this again in GnuCash 3.903 when it comes out end of May or 4.0 when it comes out around end of June please? Shall I change this to NEEDINFO John?
Chris, No, I hadn't looked at this while working on register code so if anything's changed about it it's accidental. Thanks for the reminder, I'll have a look at it today.
I found that I'd fixed it in 3.9 with https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/af298a2e38f801db16969624d018a7a5c3303151. It seems I'd lost track of the bug at that point and so I didn't mark it on the commit or close the bug.
Sigh, wrong again, John Ralls, I don't dislike you as much as you dislike me. I just wish you'd keep up sometimes.
