[OSM-talk] labels for road names and route designations

[Immanuel Scholz]

> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 04:39:09PM +0000, Etienne Cherdlu wrote:
>>
>> I guess we could specify an escaping convention for data that really
>> needs to contain a comma.  eg route=A317, NR4, Surrey Cycle Guide\, No 3.
>>
>> Do you have thoughts on any other options?
>
> The best solution would probably to store the tag data in another table
> of the database with a number of tags per item that is tagged. This is
> more relational, and has no problems with deliminators.

I don't think Etienne is speaking of storing several properties within the
database. He is speaking of delimiting ONE property which has several
values.

As example, if you have two different but correct names "A1" and "Baker
Street" for a street, you could do:

name1=A1
name2=Baker Street

or you could do:

name=A1,Baker Street


The second has the problem that a street name may contain , in its name,
in which case Etienne suggested to use \, to encode the comma. I am fine
with this, but I won't enter a comma as street name anyway.. ;-)

An completly other way would be to change the structure of properties
(currently a list of key/value pairs) to be able to hold lists of values
(so it become a list of "keys/list of values" pairs). I don't like this
very much. It looks too complex to me and is applicable in too few cases.

Ciao, Imi.