Country.xml Questions/Remarks

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K7NEW
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Joined: 12 Nov 2014, 15:56

Country.xml Questions/Remarks

Post by K7NEW »

I have been studying the “country.xml” file that I find in my “C:\Users\Mark\AppData\Roaming\Log4OM2” folder.

This looks like great resource for looking up country information for a callsign. I like that it has the DXCC entity number, and date ranges so that it can be applied to past QSO’s.

The version I am looking at:
<LastUpdate>2023-05-11T09:05:37.8529932Z</LastUpdate>

I hope somebody can help me out with a couple of things I don’t understand…

Firstly, I don’t understand the slash “/” in some of the prefixes:

Looking at South Georgia Island, for today’s date:
<PrefixList>^VP0G.*|^VP8/G.*</PrefixList>

Apparently, each prefix is a “regular expression”. The caret at the beginning matches “start of line” and the “.*” at the end matches zero or more trailing characters”.

So the first prefix, “^VP0G .*” matches all callsigns that start with “VP0G”, no problem. If I type “VP0GB” in Log4OM (with QRZ lookups disabled), it identifies the country as South Georgia Island, as it should.

But I don’t understand the “/G” in the second prefix “^VP8/G.*”. As a regular expression, it should match anything that starts with “VP8/G”. Indeed, if I type “VP8/G” in Log4OM, it identifies the country as South Georgia Island. But I don’t think “VP8/G” itself is a valid callsign. If I type more characters, e.g., “VP8/GX” (which should match the regular expression), Log4OM says the country is England. If I type a known South Georgia Island callsign, VP8SGI, Log4OM says the country is Falkland Islands, not the specific South Georgia Island in the Falklands

My second issue:
There are two “Active” countries (i.e., <Active>true</Active>) that have no StartDate/EndDate range that includes today’s date. Those countries are:
Libya
North Cook Islands
If I type a Libyan callsign 5A0YL in Log4OM, it correctly identifies the country as Libya, even though Libya has no StartDate/EndDate range that includes today’s date.

I’m guessing that when I type a callsign in Log4OM, it looks only at the active countries, and for each active country it uses the last <CountryPrefixList>, without regard to the StartDate/EndDate range. Can someone confirm that this is how it's done?

Log4OM probably uses the Startdate/EndDate range only when importing ADIF, and it may fail to properly identify these two countries in recent QSOs.

73,
--Mark K7NEW
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