Truncate dates automatically?

YoungArt100

In my experience connectors often retrieve the date of an item to include a "T" followed by a timestamp. For example, "2023-08-27T14:59:53.766Z".

Is it possible to truncate the date string automatically, retaining only the first ten characters? In this example the item's date field would have the value, "2023-08-27"

AbeJellinek

There isn't currently anything built into Zotero that would let you run a batch cleanup job like that. Someone with JavaScript knowledge could probably customize the example batch editing script to do what you're looking for.

In general, we try to save clean dates (i.e., not down to the millisecond...) to begin with. What do you see in the "Library Catalog" field of the items that have this problem?

(Note that although dates like that are ugly, they won't affect your citations.)

YoungArt100

1. Thanks Abe for this quick and helpful response. A batch cleanup solution would be nice - but it's not essential, provided that there's a way to to ensure that from this point forward the date that is retrieved conforms to my 10-character specification, without the timestamp.

2. The "Library Catalogue" field of each of the problematic items is empty.

3. Here are a couple of URLs that illustrate the problem, at my end at least:
-- https://writingcenter.unc.edu/2023/05/how-i-use-zotero-to-organize-my-research/

-- https://medium.com/voyagertoujours/how-i-organise-my-references-and-papers-to-read-with-zotero-917f0a61a309