pipe simbollogy in the guild column

[gianINTERN]

Dear FUNGuildR creators, I have a simple question: what the pipe sign "|" means in the values of the guild column? Maybe I am wrong but i cannot find any information about it. Could you please help me to interpretate this simbology?

in some cases it will appear around a single word, other times around the first single word of a list of word "-" separated, and associated to all the probability types, so i think it isn't correlated at all.

Please, could you help me?

[brendanf]

Hi gianINTERN,

Could you give me an example of a taxon where you find this in the result?

[gianINTERN]

I'm sorry for the delay in this reply, I hope you are still interested...
here some of the example, directly from the output:
FunGuild_pipeElementsExamples.csv

Thank you

[mwhite942]

I have noticed the same thing in my output. Some of these are even the same, but with/without the pipe sign around the term. For example, some of my fungi are assigned to the guild "Plant Pathogen" (for example, Resinicium bicolor and Sclerotiniaceae while others are assigned to the guild "|Plant Pathogen|" (for example, Acrophialophora). This also happens with some of my guilds that have more than one guild designation assigned, as gianINTERN indicated above; for example, I have both "Animal Pathogen-Undefined Saprotroph" and "Animal Pathogen-|Undefined Saprotroph|" (for example, Actinomucor and Rasamsonia) in my dataset. (The examples are just a couple of the many taxa assigned to these guilds.) Should I combine these into the same guild? Or are they different?

On closer inspection, it appears that taxa with guilds assigned using the species level are much less likely to have the pipe operator in their guild assignment, and taxa assigned at genus or higher level are less likely to have it. However, my dataset is too large for me to realistically go through manually and check all of the different taxa. Also, this is not always true, as the family Herpotrichiellaceae is assigned to the guild "Animal Pathogen-Fungal Parasite-Undefined Saprotroph," which doesn't have the pipe operator.

(This is also the case for output using the Python version of the FUNGuild script, and I wasn't able to find any information on this in the original paper, on the database website, or on their GitHub, either.)

Hope this additional information is helpful :)