In a recent discussion there was a request to move reference codes from mintage line comment fields to the mintage line reference fields and the response was, correctly, “It's really difficult to automatize.”. But for German Notgeld many of the moves could be automated.
Many German Notgeld reference lines have Funck reference codes (usually incorrectly labeled F#) which could be automatically detected.
Funck reference codes are all number.number, optionally followed by a single capital letter, optionally followed by one lower case letter. (There might be cases where there are two lower case letters but I believe that case is infrequent enough to ignore.)
The reference lines that could be handled by the robot:
- Only a reference code: F#<code> or Funck#<code>. Move the code and remove the comment.
- A comment beginning with F# or Funck# and a reference code followed by a right parenthesis, a space, and other comments. Move the code and keep everything after “) ”.
An example coin showing both cases:
I had requested the incorrect F# be changed to Funck# and that was done a year ago, so either there are lots of new listings or someone reverted those changes.