How to split one long tag to multiple tags?

eero.olli

I have a large library where some items have tags like:
env, behavior, travelling, transport, city, urban

Is there an efficient way to split this to multiple tags:
env
behavior
travelling
transport
city
urban

Now it is rather cumbersome.

I am considering using R with the API to split the tags. It could be possible to search for items that have comma in tag and create a small loop that would split and put the tags back to the item. Unfortunately, this could be lots of work too, as there are ready R packages for reading Zotero, but not for writing items back.

dstillman

How did these items get into Zotero? The fact that they appeared would be a bug in either the source data or the import translator used.

Zotero actually has a whole UI for easily splitting up tags by an arbitrary delimiter, but it's only shown if a tag is too long to sync. We could consider exposing it as a context-menu option on a tag in the tag selector or item pane tags box.

bwiernik

I would have a lot of use for that UI in my regular work

eero.olli

@dstillman I do not believe that there is any bug in the import translator. These tags are in items imported from Endnote XML two years ago. I was using an old version of Endnote, which I believe was storing the tags as a multiline string, with each tag on its own row, so my very old comma separated tags did actually work, even if they did not import well. Originally they are from a homemade literature database in the 90s, where I saved all tags as one long comma separated string.

It would be a great feature to have a tag-splitter. Preferably, it would remember the last separator used. And it would be great to be able to use it on multiple items at once. So the ideal workflow could be
1) search for tags that contain ","
2) select the items
3) split tags by ","

If there is already a UI, that is the obvious way to go.

When I started using Endnote, I did not know it well enough to foresee this kind of problems. Perhaps the import translators could have a feature that not just checks for the length of the tag string but also for the existence of more than two separators ( , ; tab) in one tag and then shows the tag-splitter UI to the user.