Hello,

we are about to upgrade from 1.92 to 2.05

One major problem we have is that LS 2.05 does not allow for underscores in the question code. We use underscores in all our questions, since they are part of our post-LS routine and needed for variable labels (in our case to separate different questionnaire types automatically afterwards). From my point of view this is very common.

Now I do understand that there needs to be a limitation and that not all special char are to be allowed. However, there are some like underscore that we need and I think the new design decision is to limiting. Underscores are very often used as labels and are supported in all statistic programs I know of (SPSS, R, stata etc).

Is there a get around or can you please allow for more characters in coming builds?

thanks and best
Lion

bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=9018
bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=8442
bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=8555

and
bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=8500

It is probably a lot easier to change habits in your naming of variables than to change a software.

Hi there,

thank you for your fast respone!

We use LimeSurvey for large projects, generating tons of data that is automatically processed, combined with our offline questionnaires, analyzed and stored in different systems. So in fact there is lots of software and scripts that would have to be changed on our side. Even more, we use the underscore ourselves as separator character in our process and we do need some kind of separating character. Now the question code is so limited, that there is no symbol that is safe to be used as separating character anymore.

Underscore is an important character in naming variables and there are lots of naming conventions in place that make use of underscores. We simply cannot work without the use of underscores in variable names and I am sure that we are not the only ones. And I cannot think of any safe way to work around that.

Therefore, I request to refactor your design decision and allow for underscores in question codes again.

If you want to change the SGQA naming to unique question codes maybe it would also be possible to just use the first underscore as separator and still allow for underscores in the code itself. Or use another special character for that purpose that is not used in the code.

Thank you in advance for your reply and suggestions.

Best
Lion

Hi Lion,

LS Version 2.00+ Build 131206 is the last version of LS allowing underscores use into question or answer codes.
I'm not very optimist about a prompt come back of this possibility... Probably there is an existing feature request about this.
Check and add your vote...

Hi Lion!

I can understand that this is quite inconvenient for you and your organization, as you seem to depend quite a bit on the underscore. But as Ben says, this is the case for over a year now and if you look at Dennis' post where you have 4 different bug reports / feature requests about the topic and for 3 out of the 4 the resolution is "open => won't fix

Only in the last one there seems to be some discussion about the underscore, but from what I can see, there is a specific project for which the underscore is used and thus being removed from the options.

So I have little hope that there will be a change to that. It doesn't effect me and my surveys, because I can easily avoid the underscore, but of course if there is a lot of automatic processing that relies heavily on the underscore, this might be a bummer.

But: 2.05 is really worth the hassle I think. There have been some major improvements to Limesurvey since 1.92.

Thank you guys for your feedback!

I added a feature request:
bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=9505

We will further research how we could handle our problem. Nonetheless, from my point of view underscores are an important requirement for variable lables.

Subscribing

As I've already explained in a french previous post , I' m happy to reopen this old thread to share a tested and working workaround for all users facing LS question & answer IDs format limitation:

1) Add a language to your survey (eg. esperanto)
2) Use questions & responses fields provided by this new tab to paste your ugly & LS banned references (medical coding, custom products IDs, Swedish postal codes, etc.)

Remember that new LS versions allow to export results by language.

If you prefer a plugin approach, I recommend you to contact with @DenisChenu for pro development.

Using underscore in answer code is dangerous and major professional survey programming tools are removing it . The one I work on has also stopped us to allow underscore in question ids or answer codes.

Reason:-
Lets say qid is the question code and c is the answer code.
In data exports:
#single select questions eg list radio has there column labeled as qid
#multi select questions has column labeled as qid_c

Now if we allow underscores in question ids/answer code then you would be able to assign a question id as qid_c which may conflict with other columns in database.

Let me know if its not clear.