Abbreviation Dictionaries

Hello,

My company uses lots of road data and has been labeling that data by the owner of the road. Currently, the owner information is stored in an Excel file separate from the road data. The owners names can be very long so we tend to abbreviate most of them. We had been joining the Excel road owner table to the shape file and labeling that way. I thought that maybe an abbreviation dictionary might be more efficient.

I imported the abbreviation dictionary from table and for the most part, it worked very well. However, certain issues arose.

The owners are not standardized so there can be several slightly different strings that should abbreviate to the same string. For example, the following should all abbreviate to CNRL:

Canadian Natural Resources Limited
Canadian Natural Resources
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.


Attachment 30320


It seems as if the dictionary is first scanned for "Canadian Natural Resources" which then replaces all instances of that to "CNRL".
Next, it scans for "Canadian Natural Resources Limited", but since all instances of "Canadian Natural Resources" have already been replaced with "CNRL", it is not found so the resulting label is "CNRL Limited" which is incorrect. I've tried switching the order of the different lines thinking that maybe the higher line would run first. This doesn't appear to be the case.

Is there anyway of stating which line should be abbreviated first? If I could get the longer strings abbreviated first, this should fix the problem.

Thanks,

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