Entry codes

For contests without countries, this site (and the bot) uses entry codes to uniquely identify an entry within a contest. The entry code is needed, because an artist name or song title on their own do not always uniquely identify an entry inside a contest. For example, Romania held a selection in 2020 in which Roxen performed several potential entries. And that same year, in Eurovision, "Amen" was used as a title twice.

On this page, the details on how to form entry codes are laid out. Except when absolutely impossible, entry codes are carefully constructed using a convention devised below. They are always exactly three letters long, and are based on the song titles (with only a few exceptions).

• Ignore digits, symbols, and diacritics. Count hyphenated terms as one word.
• Treat slashes (/) as spaces.
• Ignore parenthesised content, unless all words are parenthesised.
• Treat þ as t, ð as d, æ as a, ß as s, ə as e, etc.

• For one-word titles, use the first letters.
• For titles with multiple words, use the initials of the first words.
• If this were to result in a code with fewer than three letters, use x's for the remaining characters.

If more than two entries are involved in a conflict, and the execution of a certain step allows a subset of the conflict to be resolved, the resolution of this subset will take precedence over resolving the remaining conflict.

1. If titles are identical: skip to 5.¹
2. If one-word codes conflict: replace both last letters with the first different letter.²
3. If one-word and multiple-word codes conflict: preserve the one-word code and resolve the multiple-word code using point 4.
4. Otherwise,
   • Replace the last letter of the code(s) with the first different word-initial letter.³
   • Else, use the first different letter starting from the second word.³
   • Else, insert the first word’s first different letter between the original first two letters of the code.³
5. If any of the unprocessed titles contain previously not included parenthesised content: repeat step 3 (and if needed, step 4) as if this content is no longer ignored.
6. If all else fails, resolve the originally conflicting code by changing the last letter of the code with a letter from, for example, the artist’s name.

¹ Except if specified otherwise, the titles to be considered for resolution are after preprocessing.

² If the first different letter in one title exists in one title but not another, replace the lack of letter with an x.

³ If these resolutions produce another conflict, preserve the originally unaffected code and continue resolving the original conflict.