That beloved "there are extra characters after the end of reference"

[Joel Arnold]

Here's a problem that frustrates me constantly—nearly daily. I'm reading something in an external resource (word doc, web page) and they give a list of references. I decide I want to take a look and copy / paste them into Accordance. It's a string with text in between so I drop it into a word processor and delete out the intervening characters before giving it to Accordance. At which point I'm hit with my all time least favourite error message. "There are extra characters after the end of the verse reference." In this case, I spent 2 minutes parsing through until I found one semicolon I had left out. It was pretty obvious and unambiguous on the pattern of "John 4:16 Daniel 3:12." But it cost me several minutes. In multiple other cases I haven't been able to find it, eventually gave up and manually retyped the list. It's that bad.

 

So I've seen past discussion about dealing with the Google generation and such, I think the idea being that by making Accordance smart about these things we might introduce ambiguity. A few thoughts:

 

1) The google generation is us. All of us. We all do it all the time. You can't fight it.

 

2) Which is better—the possibility of maybe 5% of the time returning an erroneous result on the basis of an ambiguity, or getting nothing all the time, forcing you to comb back through the list? Incidentally, most of us learned about 20 years ago junk in, junk out; I take full responsibility for computers giving me the truth when I give them bad info. I'm ok with that.

 

3) I get that there are big coding questions here and Accordance is not Google. I do think that my example above seems plausible to code for ("John 4:16 Dan 3:12" becomes "John 4:16; Dan 3:12"). But in the meantime, it would be wonderful if the cursor would just show me where the problem was. Just highlight or go to the issue. Right now I know nothing about where I'm getting hung up. Hence manually retyping a string of references.

 

Ok, I dislike giving suggestions like this because it sounds like loud whining. Just one issue in a resource I love and use every day. Thanks!