ISBN sanity checking

ajlyon

Since ISBNs have a check digit (see http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/international/html/usm4.htm), it would be nice if Zotero notified the user if an ISBN entered in the field is not valid (i.e., doesn't pass the check). This notification could be as subtle as a little exclamation point by the field-- there are probably plenty of invalid ISBNs floating around in catalogs, but I'd like for Zotero to help me be sure that I'm entering one correctly, and warn me that there might be an issue with the ISBN I have on hand.

ajlyon

While the user interface for this might be a little difficult, this should be algorithmically easy. I could probably do the JavaScript for something like this-- would it be a worthwhile contribution?

Is this something that the Zotero team would like be interesting in adding, were someone (me) to write a patch?

adamsmith

I like this idea - seems simple, contained and helpful (to avoid confusion: I'm not Zotero dev Team and have no connection to it).

mark

I like it too (but I'm also not part of the dev team).

dstillman

Is this something that the Zotero team would like be interesting in adding, were someone (me) to write a patch?

Sure. Ticket created.

If you post a patch to that ticket (after signing up for an SVN/Trac account), we can take care of the interface side. (An exclamation point next to the field sounds appropriate.)

ajlyon

I've posted a function that handles ISBN validation to the ticket in Trac. I'm not sure of what exactly I would add such code to in a patch, so I just made a standalone function for now.

ajlyon

Bump.

Is this something that could still happen? Is there anything I could do to help this happen?

ajlyon

I've reworked my code to handle ISSNs as well, and fixed a little bug in the check digit calculation. See https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1604 for the updated version.

I still don't have the chops to patch this into Zotero myself, but it'd be nice to see. Polish, perhaps, but still good to have.