sort by date of publication in other languages

mibigo · July 28, 2011

Hello,
I noticed that the sort by date of publication is not working for items with a date of publication in languages other than english and french. Is there any way to avoid that, which will not be manually editing the date?

Best regards
Michele

adamsmith · July 28, 2011

that really depends how the dates are entered and may depend on the style. Could you give an example of such a date in a foreign language that doesn't work? Eventually Zotero will recognize dates in more languages (French actually doesn't fully work either, it just has many month starting with the same three letters as English, which is what Zotero uses), but Zotero should recognize the date regardless of language and is able to sort just by that.

ajlyon · July 28, 2011

Dates are currently only parsed correctly in English and the current interface language, I believe. I hope this will change, but for now that means that other dates need to be written in a format like 2011-07-28 to guarantee that they are parsed correctly in all locales.

adamsmith · July 28, 2011

right, but I'm thinking that Zotero will pick up years anyway and if we sort by a year-date macro the failure to parse the month - the main problem in other languages - shouldn't really matter.

mibigo · July 28, 2011

I didn't noticed that Zotero took into account the first three letters; problems infact arise when the month is expressed in letters (eg. giugno (june in Italian, or enero/january in spanish) which does not begin with the same letters as in english; but there are also reviews which display also dates like winter 2010, or Otono 2010 which are problematic.

as to the numeric format I didn't find too many problems: e.g I have dates as 27/07/2011, 2011-7-27, 27-7-20011, and so on and that seems to be working smoothly,

dstillman · July 29, 2011

Dates are currently only parsed correctly in English and the current interface language, I believe.

That's correct, and yes, it should change (though if we parse them all we should verify that there wouldn't be any conflicts between languages, particularly with abbreviations).

fbennett · July 29, 2011

The citeproc-js date parsing module (which I heard awhile back is a candidate for adoption in Zotero) can be extended with arbitrary sets of locale month names (and will disambiguate months by adding characters to the short form used for matching, if necessary). Not sure what performance would be like, but it might not be very cumbersome to set up.