Improve autocomplete widget to handle duplicated term names

Which term will be deleted and which merged once you comment it out from the dupes?

Handling duplicated term names with the autocomplete widget is difficult. At the moment the only possible ways are either to have unique name (e.g. by temporarily renaming one term) or to improve the input widget to accept term ids.
Marking this issue as "won't fix", because we cannot change the validation in this way. If someone comes up with an idea or patch for an improved autocomplete widget (which maybe accepts additionally the term id), you can open another feature request issue.

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I'll see if I can hack something up..

subscribe #608738: Warning: Your input matches with multiple terms

I thought a little bit about this issue and one solution, which should be easy to implement, would be having a fixed prefix indicating a term id, e.g. you type "term-id:123" into the autocomplete.
what would you say for this solution?

As suggested in my previous post, I extended the autocomplete widget so that someone can directly enter the term id. If you want to enter the term id, you have to use following syntax: "term-id:[tid]" (added this information as well to the description of the autocomplete fields and to the duplicate entry warnings).

The changes are available in the latest dev snapshot.

@mh86

So which text is replaced and how?

term-id:5234

or

term-id:[5234]

or

5234:[tid]

?

After some trial and error, here's what worked for me. Say you have 2 taxonomy terms with identical names that you'd like to merge, like this:

• ParentTermA
  • ChildTermDuplicate (Drupal taxonomy ID = 123; this will be the resulting merged term)
• ParentTermB
  • ChildTermDuplicate (Drupal taxonomy ID = 456; this term will disappear after merge)

You've got to hover over each duplicate term and inspect the link URL to get the tid. For example, the URL /admin/content/taxonomy_manager/termdata/99/123 tells us that the tid is 123. (99 would be the vocabulary ID.) Make note of the tid for the term you'd like to keep.

Then when you go to enter the "Resulting merged term", don't type the name of the term. Instead, type this:

term-id:123

Where 123 is the tid of the term you want to keep. The text term-id should be typed literally. End result:

• ParentTermA
  • ChildTermDuplicate (Drupal taxonomy ID = 123)
• ParentTermB

this sorta blows - accidentally typed in term-id:[1234] instead of term-id:1234 - it deleted both terms and didn't create term-id:[1234] term to fix with... my solution has been to go to create a new term then go to the taxonomy_manager_merge table and manually add the new term where the 0 was - am definitely interested in testing a fix - less happiness reigned in the empire

Well in V7 all works ok, you just put

term-id:[the id of your term]

and it catches the term you are looking for with out any problem

So just update to drupal 7