Directory structure has information

Alrich
For the work I am doing, my zotero directory structure holds information, I would like to harvest, that is not now available through copy-paste methods. My sole option is to take a screen shot and put it through OCR.
Ideally, I could produce a report. I looked for something like a path in the report Zotero has, and didn't see it. (of course it provides the literal windows path, but not the internal-to-zotero path, which is what I would like.)
Zotero just assigns a digital label and drops each citation into its own folder in the zotero storage file. So no getting the information here. I'm guessing it'd be a lot of work for programmers. Oh well.
Do you think a copy-paste solution could be implemented?
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure what directory structure you're referring to? Can you say more, and provide a more concrete example, a screenshot, etc.?
  • Alrich
    Customarily in Windows, directory trees help sort and organize files. I use the same logic in Zotero, but I don't know where or how the directory tree is stored, because it isn't a literal directory tree (the storage folder is one long list of items, not replicating the directory structure that I can see when Zotero is open.)
    Also in Windows, I can go into dos and using a few commands create a text file that lists the contents of a given directory. For quick reference, this information is sometimes useful.
    For purposes of understanding how I have divided my items into categories, having a literal output of the directory tree would be helpful.
  • aborel
    edited 17 days ago
    It sounds like you are using collections to organize references in your Zotero library (a completely valid way to work, obviously).
    However, if this assumption is correct, I want to point out that Zotero collections do not behave like directories in a file system:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#collections

    Thus, there is no tree to look for. A given reference can belong to one or many collections: while the structure of collections might be represented by a tree, the analogy breaks down as soon as you start adding references into the picture. The result is a more complex network, and the information about this network is safely stored inside a database.

    This being said, if you give more details about your goals, perhaps someone can offer a practical solution that will address your need?
  • Alrich
    I really just wanted to have a list of my directories and subdirectories. I don't remember why, as you may note, I opened this chat in May, 2024. The directory screen doesn't support copy, so I couldn't paste it into a document.
  • aborel
    edited 16 days ago
    It's OK if you don't remember the exact motivation for your first post. But what is your actual need today? That information would be very useful, without it I find it difficult to provide a constructive answer - something more helpful than "well, sorry, you can't do that" ;-) .
  • Alrich
    My "need" is to create a text rendering of the directory and or directory tree. I don't know how "copy" is made a thing where text is displayed, But at minimum just to be able to highlight the directory/directory-tree, and copy it, in the library view of Zotero, would be really useful. I realize this is probably a developer/coder sort of thing, and maybe "well, sorry, you can't do that", but that is the need. At a deeper level, as in "What are you really needing?", I think I wanted to put the directory into an excel spreadsheet and use the directory labels as categories. My fondest hope was to select "print" and have Zotero either produce a pdf, a .txt file, or print out the directory tree, but that sounds more complicated and like more work, than simply making "copy" a thing, but I have avoided making programming one of my skills. An alternate approach would be to have an html view that could be copied. That could be displayed in a browser and converted to text via copy-paste.

    Thanks for your interest and determination to get to the bottom of this inquiry. I am grateful for all the work done by coders and community members to make Zotero, like so many other terrific and low cost software, available to the world.
  • aborel
    edited 16 days ago
    The easiest way to extract a copy of your collection tree is to capture a screenshot.
    If you are using a Mac with a recent version of MacOS, the Preview application will recognize the text more or less automatically. On other systems, some PDF viewers would probably achieve the same result.

    Otherwise, you can export your library in the Zotero RDF format. It contains a huge lot of information (everything in your database, essentially), which can seem overwhelming but if you're interested enough it's manageable. Here's a process you might follow:

    1. Open the RDF file in a text editor
    2. Find the 1st occurence of z:collection
    3. After this occurrence, all lines with a dc:title should contain the name of the corresponding collection. If there are just a few, search for that string within the text editor; if you have more (I guess that's probably your case), you could copy the text from here until the end of the file into a spreadsheet, and sort the lines to bring all dc:title entries together.

    Otherwise, well, I don't see any simple way to do what you want without at least a few lines of Javascript code. Probably very few lines, and the result would certainly be cleaner, but personally I don't know exactly how to do it.
  • adamsmith
    I think Zotero RDF is the way to go. If you're open to using an LLM, I just threw a small one into Claude (3.7 Sonnet) with this prompt:
    "Here's an export of a Zotero library in RDF format. It contains information about the collection structure in the z:Collection tags. Can you given me a plain text representation of the collection tree, please?"

    And it gave me the tree, actually with paper names included, so you might want to modify the prompt to specify you don't want these. At some size library you'll want to remove the actual item information because LLMs struggle with overly large files.
  • aborel
    LLM: right, I should have thought of that!
  • Alrich
    Thanks for the RDF suggestion! That's all stuff I do.
    Steve Alrich.
Sign In or Register to comment.