The Lancashireman's software : DhG2

Frequently-asked questions

The “frequently-asked” part might not be entirely true. :-)

Why did you write DhG2?

See the blog post Family snapshot.

Why do I get a message ‘Unrecognised header line: “sex” ignored …’?

This usually happens when you use the new command to create a person. If DhG2 cannot determine the gender from the name, the default template places the word “sex” there instead.

You can edit the person’s file and set the gender to Male, Female or Unk as appropriate. If you don’t, you’ll get the message for every file whenever you start DhG2 or reload the database.

DhG2 builds up a list of name-to-gender mappings when it loads the database, so as your database grows, the likelihood of getting this message gets less as time goes on.

Yes, but why don’t you just use “Unk” by default?

Using an unrecognised value means you get the message as a reminder to edit the file.

If you don’t want to use the gender information at all, you could create a custom template for new cards. See advanced topics for more information.

What is DhG_Specials.py?

This file contains some extensions to DhG_Shell.py that perform special operations in the author’s database. The operations depend on the conventions used by the author; for example, that England and Wales census records have a Source of the form “Census record HO107…” or “Census record RG…”. If you don’t follow this convention, the features won’t be very useful.

To use DhG_Specials.py, just invoke it instead of DhG_Shell.py. Apart from the extra commands, it behaves in an identical manner. Note: the author only uses DhG_Specials.py when the extra features are needed, and usually in a non-interactive script.

There is no documentation for the special features apart from the built-in help.