C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:49:21 -0300 (CLST)

I've never come across a concrete example of this before - one of the
original claims of XML, and one that I've seen questioned as XML has
become more complex and slowly dropped out of fashion - but I just
hand-edited an XML file and saved some data from oblivion.

We use GnuCash to track our expenses, and in older versions they were in
some haphazard "currency" that was called "Chilean Pesos", but formatted
as UK Pounds.  Which was probably half my fault and half GnuCash's.

Anyway, the version of GnuCash I just started up in Suse 10.2 has been
fixed (i handles things more correctly, which means that the broken
behaviour we "used" before was no longer broken), which meant that our
finances were suddenly missing values smaller than 1000 pesos.  Not a huge
problem (less than a pound), but annoying.

But after poking around a little with emacs (if you try this at home it
helps to know that by default GnuCash gzips its files) I found out how to
convert everything (via a keyboard macro) into real pesos.

Andrew