Titles ending in ? followed by a period

jongiff
I am encountering the addition of a period at the end of a title that ends in a question mark. This was discussed in an earlier discussion (now closed), which suggests it had been resolved, but I have just encountered it. Here's the example:

Button, Kenneth J. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).

The title is entered in Zotero as:

A book, the application, and the outcomes: how right was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the effects of the deregulation of the US domestic airline market?

Thank you.
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  • adamsmith
    which citation style, which version of Zotero?
  • jongiff
    Zotero 4.0.26
    Style: Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition (note).
  • fbennett
    edited February 19, 2015
    Haven't tried Zotero 4.0.26, but with MLZ it works okay (i.e. there is no extraneous period).

    Testers: here is the data for the item.
  • bwiernik
    It's working correctly (no period) for me in Zotero 4.0.26, as well as with the current beta, and with the current version of the Processor Gadget and/or Uppercase Subtitle gadget.

    This behavior was occurring before a recent update to the processor. @jongiff, do you happen to have the Processor Gadget or Uppercase Subtitles Gadgets installed? If so, what version?
  • jongiff
    bwiernik, thank you.

    I am not consciously using either the Processor Gadget or Uppercase Subtitles Gadget.

    I'm using Firefox 35.0.1 on a Mac running OS X 10.10.2

    One detail in the text data given by fbennett: I have used italics for the book title in the title field, which don't show in fbennett's test data. When I take that out of the title it works correctly. So I think putting that formatting in the article title field is causing the problem.
  • adamsmith
    That's a good extra bit of information, but still can't replicate this. Do you get the same problem in the test pane?
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/reference_test_pane
    or only in Word/LibreOffice?
  • jongiff
    Thank you adamsmith.

    I am replicating the problem in the test pane, as follows:

    - For CMoS 16th ed (author-date) the problem appears in the test pane as follows:

    Individual Citations
    (Button 2015)
    Single Citation (with position "first")
    (Button 2015)
    Bibliography
    Button, Kenneth J. 2015. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47 (1).

    - For CMoS 16th ed (full note) the problem appears as follows (from the test pane):

    Individual Citations
    Kenneth J. Button, “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?,” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).
    Single Citation (with position "first")
    Kenneth J. Button, “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?,” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).
    Bibliography
    Button, Kenneth J. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).

    [NOTE THAT THE ITALICS AREN'T COPYING FROM THE TEST PANE BUT ARE THERE FOR THE BOOK TITLE AND THE JOURNAL TITLE.]

    - For CMoS 1tth ed (note) the problem appears as follows (from the test pane):

    Individual Citations
    Button, “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.”
    Single Citation (with position "first")
    Button, “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.”
    Bibliography
    Button, Kenneth J. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).

    [AGAIN THE ITALICS ARE THERE BUT AREN'T COPYING]
  • fbennett
    Yep, that's what I have here, but it isn't showing the period in either of those styles. To look into this more closely, I think we'll need to have the exact data and the style that you are using. You can export the item with right-click in the center pane, then "Export item ...", and then selecting "Zotero RDF" to save it to a file. If you can then paste both the exported item data and the style code into a gist at http://gist.github.com (copy-pasting the style with "Select all" from the CSL Editor) and post the URL back here, we can try with the exact code you are using.

    Sorry for the extra trouble, but none of us seem to have been able to reproduce the failure so far.
  • jongiff
    edited February 21, 2015
    You are taking me to places not known before....

    Here is the gist address (I think):

    https://gist.github.com/8028c254612b778d8360.git

    Please advise if I have done this incorrectly.

    Thanks.
  • fbennett
    edited February 21, 2015
    The style came through fine, no problems there.

    The RDF for the item was broken in a bunch of ways (it looks like it was copy-pasted from a browser view of the RDF, which omits a bunch of stuff). I fixed it up, though, and imported the data, and again it renders with no period after the question mark. The corrected data is here. A screenshot of the item data is here. A screenshot of the rendered item is here.

    There does not appear to be a problem in the processor. If you file a Debug ID, that will provide some details of your system to the Zotero developers that may offer a clue to the cause.
  • jongiff
    Debug ID appears to want me to perform an action while Debug Output Logging is enabled. What action should I perform?

    Thanks.
  • jongiff
    I just opened the reference (clicking the arrow to the left) and closed it, and it generated 4 lines of output, which I submitted to the Zotero Server. The ID is

    D1958536954

    Thanks.
  • fbennett
    That should do it.

    Dan, what does it show for plugins? That's about all I can figure for a cause.
  • adamsmith
    unfortunately, I don't think debug gives Dan a list of add-ons. @jongiff -- could you also give us an error report ID? Timing doesn't matter:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#provide_a_report_id
    (though obviously the "report error" menu option can't be greyed out. If it is, just select some random text and click import from clipboard in Zotero. That'll give Zotero an error to log).
  • fbennett
    @adamsmith: It's in your hands; I'm stumped on this one.
  • jongiff
    Here is the error report ID:

    1693285847

    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    @Dan - could you post the version numbers and potentially relevant add-ons in there? Also, any error that might be telling?
  • dstillman
    35.0.1/4.0.26. Nothing installed that should interfere.
  • jongiff
    So have we reached a dead end on this?
  • adamsmith
    Somewhat. Do you know the locale of your Firefox? en-US or something else?
  • jongiff
    I just updated to Firefox 36.0. I don't know how to find out my locale. I did check and the anomaly is still occurring, as below.

    Thanks.

    Button, Kenneth J. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).
  • adamsmith
    type about:config in your URL bar, press return, promise you'll be careful, then filter for
    general.useragent.locale
    and tell us what its value is.
  • jongiff
    en-US

    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    so that's not it, either. I'll play around with this some more over the weekend to see if I can replicate it.
  • fbennett
    Okaaaay ...

    We can also take this from the other end, so to speak. I'll work up a test version of the Zotero client that reports out some details on the punctuation suppression steps. If we trace the steps it performs when succeeding on our machines, differences in the trace on yours may help us figure out where the difference lies.

    There has to be a reason for the discrepancy.
  • Gracile
    The RDF for the item was broken in a bunch of ways
    Isn't that strange and somehow related to the issue?
  • fbennett
    It was a cut-and-paste from the Web view of the item. That drops (or doesn't display) the namespace attributes in the header; once those were restored, and the literal tags for italics were replaced with entities, the item loaded normally. I'm pretty sure we're working from the same content.

    I've posted to @jongiff privately with an offer of a debugging build of the latest Zotero. It will dump a trace of the input data, the punctuation tracing steps, and the output object. From that, I should be able to see (or intuit) what is going wrong at that end.
  • adamsmith
    (There's an odd issue with jongiff's Chicago style in another thread--waiting to hear back on that, but the problem may well be related to an old version of the style).
  • jongiff
    Checking in on this thread. It appears the errant period is still appearing (Chicago (note)).

    Button, Kenneth J. “A Book, the Application, and the Outcomes: How Right Was Alfred Kahn in The Economics of Regulation about the Effects of the Deregulation of the US Domestic Airline Market?.” History of Political Economy 47, no. 1 (2015).

    I checked the style preview and the problem appears as follows in selected styles:

    Am Anthro - ok
    Am Medical - ok
    Am Political Science - wrong
    Am Sociological - wrong
    APA 6th - ok
    Cell - ok
    CMoS 16 (author-date) - wrong
    CMoS 16 (full note) - wrong
    CMoS 16 (note) - wrong
    Elsevier Harvard (with titles) - ok
    Harvard Reference format 1 (author date)) - ok
    IEEE - ok
    MLA 7th - wrong

    @fbennett if I should pick back up the thread with you I am happy to do so.

    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    issue with jongiff's styles has been resolved (or rather never existed; I just overlooked something), so that wasn't the cause of this, either.
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