Zotfile: Adding default wildcards for Date (ISO 8601), month and day

Currently, Zotfile has different wildcards ( http://zotfile.com/index.html#renaming-rules ) including the wildcard for a year (%y). It's natural and expected that such a field would exist.

But sadly many other natural and expected wildcards don't exist:
- Date in ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD like 2023-01-23.
- Month (at least the double digits, even though other formats are also welcomed)
- Day (at least the double digits, even though other formats are also welcomed)

To get those one has to work with the unsupported user-defined wildcards using replace functions, regex, etc. This is a very hard and tedious thing to do for those who know how to do it and it's basically impossible for those who don't.

Could you please add those fields?
  • edited January 23, 2023
    I don't think ZotFile is actively developed, so this is unlikely to happen, honestly.

    FWIW, since ZotFile is mainly used for PDFs of academic works where the exact date of publication is rarely cited (and can actually change in confusing ways), I don't think ISO8601 is "natural and expected," and hasn't been something much requested before -- that's not to say there's no usecase: I'm sure you have something in mind that's important to you, but I don't have the impression that generalizes widely. I'm not sure Zotero would be likely to add this even when expanding built-in renaming options (as I understand is the plan).
  • The most recent Zotfile update was late last year (Oct 9, 2022). But that was for bug fixes not new features. And the Zotfile documentation still refers to some old features (extraction of PDF annotations to Zotero notes) that are no longer part of Zotfile since Zotero 6 (when they became part of Zotero itself). But the main features - rename and move downloaded PDFs as linked files to a custom folder location - still work perfectly well. Issues/requests should be directed to the developer ...
    https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile
  • Thank you both for your replies.

    Most popular citation formats usually only use a year, but there is a reason why so many formats exist, each with its own take on the subject.

    Adamsmith, my 25+ years of experience organizing digital files has convinced me that YYYY-MM-DD is the superior format. I came to that conclusion before I knew of any official ISO formats. Over the years it has saved me an enormous amount of stress, confusion, and pain. I apply it to basically everything: research papers, images, .odt files, photos, presentations (including all the drafts), books, magazines, saved news and articles, documentation, project files, etc.

    I use Zotero for all my .pdf files. Research files are in a minority there. But even with them, I use the ISO format naming. It's very convenient to have file names that actually have useful information instead of just a year and usually irrelevant list of authors.

    I created an issue:
    https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/issues/644
  • For anyone who needs this functionality, I've posted a comment on the Github issue with a custom wildcard snippet you can add: https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/issues/644#issuecomment-1732490794
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