Official station names vs. alternatives

[jncn]

How do we handle official names and their alternatives?
e.g. Brussel-Nationaal-Luchthaven vs. Brussels-Airport or Amsterdam CS (old name) vs. Amsterdam Centraal (official name).

[pietercolpaert]

That's a good question. This is where our CSV model gets a bit too limited. If we add 1 alternative, the alternative should also be translated, right?

Should we change our repository to use JSON instead?

[pietercolpaert]

As I've understood from our conversation at https://gitter.im/iRail/iRail, you're using this repo to load the stations inside SQLite. I think therefore keeping our CSV table as is is a good idea.

Another possible solution would be to add yet an extra column for autocomplete purposes: alternative-1 alternative-2 ...

What do you think?

[brechtvdv]

I don't think adding extra columns for alternatives is feasible.. See also: iRail/iRail#68

[brechtvdv]

I suggest we add an extra csv-file with two columns: alternative-name and official name. Much easier to maintain

[pietercolpaert]

Right now our kind of organically grown method is to hardcode them in our "autocomplete" code in PHP: https://github.com/iRail/stations/blob/master/src/irail/stations/Stations.php#L33

For instance, we could also add that everything that's "CS" is replaced with "centraal"?

Of course this doesn't help other programming languages...