Multiple Citations

I'm looking for a little help with joining multiple citations. If I have two citations, e.g.:

David Jones, Ben goes to Sea (Washington: Academic Publishing, 1993).
John Smith, The Adventures of Theo (Dallas: Davis House, 2011).

The <citation> block in my CSL file is as follows:

<citation et-al-min="4" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-names="true">
<layout suffix="" delimiter="; ">
<choose>
<if type="post-weblog">
<text macro="citation-block"/>
</if>
<else>
<text macro="citation-block" suffix="."/>
</else>
</choose>
</layout>
</citation>

If I have these two citations together, I end up with:

David Jones, Ben goes to Sea (Washington: Academic Publishing, 1993).; John Smith, The Adventures of Theo (Dallas: Davis House, 2011).

Note the '.;' conjunction between them - this is what I would like to remove. I can change this by setting the layout suffix to "." and remove the suffix from the second text element, however this will add a period to the end of the citation even if only a post-weblog type is used, which would be good to avoid.

Is it possible to only add the "." suffix to the layout if the final item is not of type post-weblog? To be clear, I'm hoping to be able to achieve:

David Jones, Ben goes to Sea (Washington: Academic Publishing, 1993); John Smith, The Adventures of Theo (Dallas: Davis House, 2011).

But also have this work for web citations:

David Jones, Ben goes to Sea (Washington: Academic Publishing, 1993); June Thomas, 'A day in my life', Thoughts, 17 November 2014, http://www.myblog.com/a-day-in-my-life
  • I don't think that can be done, sorry. Best advice I'd have is to not use a period anywhere and then set it as a suffix indivually when you insert the citation (unless it ends on a URL).
  • I think I pretty much expected that to be the answer, although it's a bit frustrating to hear. I guess CSL is what it is, and some scenarios are just overly complex. Thanks for your input.
  • edited September 16, 2018
    FWIW, placing a period after URLs is a horrible idea that should not be the default of any citation style. There's no need to always end everything with a period (just an old habit), and by adding one there's a very good chance it will be misparsed by automatic URL recognition as part of the URL and make it non-functional. This is just a minor pet peeve of mine. If CSL could automate that, it would be great. The problem is that technically then it wouldn't follow the various misguided citation styles that insist on a period after everything including URLs.

    Sorry this isn't really a constructive comment here. But @daggmano +1 for this being an odd quirk. Still, I understand why it isn't default in Zotero, because it should be but isn't how most styles work...

    Since this would be a suffix on the whole layout, rather than an individual citation, I'm not sure there's a way to do it. But would you mind if your citations were all joined by periods? That should then be possible to do, if you don't mind not distinguishing the final character from the delimiter. Of course it could be more confusing if you have a URL (weblog) as a non-final citation in a block. Not sure there.
  • On the contrary @djross3 I appreciate the comment. This does seem to be an obvious improvement to the CSL specification, but I expect the only chance of getting something like this working would be for the citeproc project to 'go rogue' and implement some non-standard features - which I would have mixed feelings about in any case.

    But anyway, thanks for the feedback, it's nice to know I'm not the only one struggling with this stuff.
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