IN: M: 07:00-17:00 | T: 07:00-17:00 | W: 07:00-17:00 | T: 07:00-17:00 | F: 07:00-17:00 | Sat: 07:00-17:00 | Sun: closed OUT: Mo-Sa 07:00-17:00; Su closed I saw over 10 instances of this in North America.
The single pipe as a separator is probably the smaller problem in that expression though, even without that this will fail on the single character weekday names, 'T' is ambiguous in English alone already. Looking at how '|' is used in the full OSM corpus, this seems to be in roughly equal parts: * as rule separator (';'): e.g. "Thu 07:30-18:00 | Fr 08:00-18:00" * instead of a comma: e.g. "Mo-Fr 08:00-12:00 | 13:00-17:00" * instead of '||': e.g. "Mo-Fr 09:00-13:00 | "nach Vereinbarung"" When we guess/assume one of those interpretations it will possibly result in false results in the other cases.
My vote is - we assume it is a comma: - Few people understand and use || format, and when they do, there is less chance for a typo (they know what they are doing). We can rely on human review for autocorrection to catch that. - I think the real purpose for semicolon is to list exceptions to previous rules, for simple cases like in the original example (M: 07:00-17:00 | T: 07:00-17:00), comma is a safe bet.