BibTeX export: Tag export strange

beathovn
Hi, when exporting an entry from zotero to BibTeX format, the tags get additional curly braces at seemingly random position, spanning several tags. After a closer look, I think, the curly braces get added, whenever both "multi-word" tags (one tag including whitespace) and single-word (without whitespace) tags appear. The additional curly braces then span all the single-word tags (plus separating commas) plus the last word of the preceding tag plus the first word of the following tag, i.e. from whitespace to whitespace. Let's take an example:
zotero tags:
* useful stuff
* foo
* bar
* something more
The tags get BibTeX-exported as:
keywords = {useful {stuff,foo,bar,something} more},

A slightly different example:
zotero tags:
* foo
* bar
* useful stuff
* more
* most useful
* stuff
The tags get BibTeX-exported as:
keywords = {{foo,bar,useful} stuff,more,most useful,stuff},
Note, that this time, "most useful" did not get any curly braces, but they are in the beginning instead. In general, I think, these additional curly braces are superfluous and can be removed completely.

I'm running zotero 2.0b5 in Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.0.9 under Debian GNU/Linux (testing).

If you need any more info, please don't hesitate to contact me.
  • noksagt
    I cannot replicate this with your example. It is likely that your actual tags have capital letters. Some such tags are encased in braces to preserve case. However, only a space is treated as a delimiter right now (and Zotero delimits multiple keywords with only a comma).
  • beathovn
    Ahh, stupid me - you are right. In the actual tags were capital letters...
    But do you think, it's important to preserve case for tags? Maybe not. But if yes, could then maybe the logic for setting the braces be extended to also recognize the keyword-delimiter as a delimiter? That would feel more natural to me...
    Thanks for the swift reply!
  • noksagt
    I don't know what BibTeX styles use keywords (if any) off-the-top-of-my-head, so don't know if preserving capitalization is strictly needed. The exporter should, of course, be patched so that multiple keywords don't share brackets. I had patched my copy to use ', ' (comma and space) as a keyword delimiter instead (a trivial fix), but I guess I never submitted this or a few other BibTeX fixes to trac.
  • beathovn
    That sounds like you are going to do this soon... ;-) That would be great!
    Many thanks in advance.

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