Yes, this is what we will standardize on. I will be writing a script to fix all existing entries.

Perfect!

Here are all the abbreviations currently in use in the species field of our database (the number to the left is how many plants have that abbreviation):

22,103 var.
13,351 subsp.
3,219 ssp.
935 f.
8 v.
5 spp.
4 b.
2 aff.
2 K.
1 var.canescens
1 ssp.repandum
1 s.
1 p.
1 nvar.
1 nothosubsp.
1 n.
1 h.
1 cf.
1 c.
1 aurea.
1 arach.
1 ST.
1 S.
1 P.

I don't know what some of these are and am going to ignore them for now. The ssp. is the big one that is used a lot. There are also a bunch of miscellaneous ones scattered here and there that have misspellings or no period (like "var" instead of "var.") I have to look for those one by one.

Example: Aconitum alboviolaceum var f. albiflorum

That's the update for now. I'm working this right now and will post the update soon.

3,277 have been updated. Most of those were the ssp. abbreviations.

Final update: I have changed the code so that when you add a new plant, or edit an existing one, the system will automatically correct any abbreviations that may be non-standard.

So if you try to add a plant with a species of, for example, "foo ssp. bar" then the system will auto-update that to read "foo subsp. bar".

The same with synonyms and editing plant names. So this should resolve that once and for all.

Now, there are a few oddball plants still in the system that weren't found but that I know are there. For one, some of the alliums have "var.foo" where foo is some var. name. My script couldn't catch it because there was no space after the period.

My brain gets all twisted up just thinking about how you do that Dave.
Thank you for all your knowledge and the amazing things you do for us.

And thank -YOU- to eclayne for driving this issue. Sure made things easier and simpler for me. Teamwork.

Go, Evan!

Fantastic Dave. Thanks!

If there are a bunch of misc. items would it be easier to run a script like the duplicates list for us to attend to?

Also could you to "park" a link to the duplicates list in the DB forum sidebar?

If I could write a script to produce such a list I would have. I don't see how I can put such a thing together. We'll just have to fix 'em as we run into them.

eclayne said:Also could you to "park" a link to the duplicates list in the DB forum sidebar?

?

Okee doke.

I think you were asking to have the plant dup report linked to from the sidebar in this forum, so that's what I did.

Where, I just have a great long add in that space?

Never mind, I found it.

Sorry I missed the ? in earlier post.

You come up with the most amazing ideas Evan. How do you even think of those things?

Okay, but let me remind everyone again that lots of rose cultivars share a name, so don't be surprised by the many roses on the list.

And the "duplicate" Clematises actually are of different species.

Thanks Lynn. There not really ideas, just problems I run up against which I hope ATP'ers and Dave can solve.

Dave, There are a number of Iris showing up with ssp. When I went to change the abbreviation it shows up as subsp. Here are 3 examples, there are others.

It's automatically changing it from ssp. to subsp. because I programmed it to do that.

But why these exist in the first place confuses me a bit. All the " ssp. " abbreviations should have automatically been converted. I'll look further into this.