[OSM-talk] Handling of towns with different or alternative names

[Matthias Julius]

Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 04:36:08PM -0500, Matthias Julius wrote:
>> That's actually error prone if someone enters a semicolon who doesn't
>> know about the rule.  I think that should better be reversed or '\;'
>> be used as separator because this is much less likely to appear in
>> regular data.
>
> Almost any character could appear in regular data, unless it’s quite a
> special character—say, rather appropriately, the unit separator (US,
> ASCII 0x1f).  The problem then is entering the special character.

While this is true, a key sequence like '\;' or '\\' should rarely be
seen in nature.  At least it should be a lot less likely than a single
';'.  To be on the safe side we can use '/|\|/|\|/|\' or similar.  ;-)

>
> Ultimately the user should not have to care what, or if a, separator is
> used, and they would be presented with multiple values as appropriate
> for the interface they are using.

This is true, but AFAIK no editor supports that, yet.  Until then it
needs to be done manually.

Matthias