chessbase Light question

[ChessAddict]

I want to remove the names from the games that i have in my database. It would take forever if i did it one by one. Does anyone know a way that i can delete the names for the games all at once? Thanks.

[Werner]

perhaps switching to players you can edtit the players names or the same with tounaments.

[Mike S.]

It can still be a problem if there are very many different names...

In PGN, it could be possible in an ASCII editor or word processor, if it has a search & replace function which features wildcards. I don't know at the moment if MS Word has that (but I think it hasn't?).

But if a program has that, the idea is to

replace all [White "*"] with [White "?"] (with * being the wildcard symbol)

Maybe there are also PGN tools around which have a function like "strip all names"? Unfortunately I don't know such tools. Maybe Google finds them.

Also, if the question was about ChessBase Light 2007, you'd need the registered version to be able to replace names player by player, in a CBH (but the old version should work).

[David Dahlem]

It can still be a problem if there are very many different names...

In PGN, it could be possible in an ASCII editor or word processor, if it has a search & replace function which features wildcards. I don't know at the moment if MS Word has that (but I think it hasn't?).

But if a program has that, the idea is to

replace all [White "*"] with [White "?"] (with * being the wildcard symbol)

Maybe there are also PGN tools around which have a function like "strip all names"? Unfortunately I don't know such tools. Maybe Google finds them.

The text/pgn editor i use is called Notespad. It's excellent for pgn files, and it does have the search/replace feature. It should be easy to find a download with Google.

Regards
Dave

[ChessAddict]

I have the full version of chessbase light but don't no the function to remove names of all of white and black. The games i have are .cbh files. Can you explain further what i would have to do? Thanks.

[Mike S.]

I would try it like this:

1. In the main screen, doubleclick the database
2. In the database's screen, click the "Players" tab
2a. select one player (if not yet selected)
3. from the menu, Edit/Select All
4. from the menu, Edit (or the edit button, or F2)

Meanwhile, I remember that it is possible to edit more than one player name at the same time in CB 7.0 but I don't have it on my internet computer, and only the free Light 2007 version. But it is required anyway to standardize different name spellings. The question is now, if there is a limit for the number of names which can be editied simultanously.

[ChessAddict]

I tried it like you said. Well it isn't the fastest way to do it but it's better than doing it one by one. If anyone knows a faster way to do it let me know. Thanks.

[shiv]

If you can export all your data to pgn, then a one line perl script can take care of this, essentially if you have a tag like [White "Kasparov"] and you want to change these to [White "*"] for all games, you can easily do this in perl. Mike mentioned using a text editor, but a perl script is probably easier.

If you have perl installed on your system (www.activestate.com) , you can use the following link to help (http://www.wellho.net/forum/Perl-Progra ... -file.html)

Steps:
1. You export the data to PGN.
2. You get perl installed on your system. (http://perl.about.com/od/gettingstarted ... erlwin.htm)
3. Write script to do your job. Use http://www.wellho.net/forum/Perl-Progra ... -file.html
as a reference.
4. Run script

If you are using windows step 2 above applies. On mac or linux, typically perl is already available to be used.

This should change all the data in one shot.

[shiv]

Once you get perl installed and the PGN file ready, you simply need the execute the below 2 commands:

perl -p -i -e "s/\[White.+\]/[White \"\*\"]/g" yourfile.pgn

and

perl -p -i -e "s/\[Black.+\]/[Black \"\*\"]/g" yourfile.pgn

This seems a little non-intuitive so I decided to post these. They worked for me. All that is needed now is to install perl and convert your database to pgn.