Date validation - case sensitive - Categorized in: Report a Problem

Louis
What do you make of Tamura Jone's comment (http://www.tamurajones.net/SiblingTortureTest.xhtml):

None of these produced any errors or warnings, except Behold 1.04.
Behold warned that the date 13 Apr 2012 is non-standard, and should be 13 APR 2012; the warning is that the abbrevation should be in ALL-CAPITALS.
That is what the specification seems to say, but it does not;
Chapter 2 of the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification clearly states that All controlled line_value choices should be considered as case insensitive.,
and that values should be converted to all uppercase or all lowercase prior to comparing.
That means that Apr is fine, and that means that you may even write aPR or aPr

It seems to me that all lower or all upper is correct but not mixed, as Tamura suggests.

Brett

So what does:

values should be converted to all uppercase or all lowercase prior to comparing.

actually mean?

Is this when:

1. comparing two dates within a program, such as to work out age or

2. two supposedly identical GEDCOMs are compared for differences?

If 1 above, how does a user know it is being done correctly by the user?

If 2 above, how do we change a GEDCOM to same case in both files, without a large (and possibly manual) conversion.

Brett

I assume this applies to BET, ABt etc in that they can be Bet, bet etc but compared upper or lower cased.

Brett