(Bug) Locale issues concerning Zotero and Zotero connector

zeyu42
I think I've found a bug related to language/locale, but I couldn't find a place to file it. So I guess I may report it here.

The language I use my operating system (macOS in my case) is Chinese. It seems the Zotero connector is smart enough to identify my system locale when I add an article to Zotero. If the exact date is provided by the webpage of the article, Zotero connector saves the month in Chinese, which Zotero doesn't recognize. I have to manually change the Chinese characters denoting the month into English for it to understand. This bug persists no matter the language Zotero uses.
  • adomasven
    Are you using the Zotero Connector in Safari?
  • zeyu42
    In Edge, actually.
  • dstillman
    Can you provide an example URL where you're seeing this?
  • zeyu42
    Sure, an example is this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1772690.1772698
  • dstillman
    I'm not seeing this. If I set macOS to "Chinese, Simplified", start Zotero, start Edge, go to that page, and save, I get "April 26, 2010" in the Date field.
  • zeyu42
    I think I figured it out. Zotero connector respects browser language settings over the system one. So despite the fact that you have changed your system language to Chinese, your browser remains English, that's why Zotero connector is still saving the month attribute in English, not Chinese. I figured this out by putting English at the top of the languages I use in Edge and the issue goes away. In fact, previously, I do have English in this list (so Edge won't offer to translate the page if it were in English), but it's not on the top. On the top was Chinese, that's why Zotero connector is saving the month attribute in Chinese.

    Still, I think that's a bug, though there's a workaround, since Zotero connector is saving something into Zotero that Zotero fails to recognize.
  • zeyu42
    Thanks for your experimentation! It helped me figure out where the problem is.
  • dstillman
    edited June 17, 2022
    There are a couple issues here:

    1) The Zotero Connector is converting the numeric date provided by the site into a formatted date rather in the Date field, for no particular reason — generally translators just save dates unambiguously as YYYY-MM-DD, and that should happen here too. We'll fix that.

    2) Zotero wasn't properly parsing dates that contained month names using Chinese characters. I've fixed that in the latest Zotero beta, and the fix will be included in Zotero 6.0.9.
  • zeyu42
    That's cool. Thank you.
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