Eliminating unwanted characters on import

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Enkidu

Eliminating unwanted characters on import

Post by Enkidu »

I've been playing around with my new copy of Bookends for a few days now (great program, btw). I created a new import filter which works almost like a charm, but there are a couple of small issues.
I'm importing records from WebSPIRS, which doesn't seem to be quite the same as SilverPlatter WebSPIRS. One of their fields looks like this:

SOURCE: Philosophy-. JA 75; 50: 101-103

I used the Source option to create a special filter for this, where source1tag was "SOURCE:", then collect from first character to "." as Journal Title, then to ";" as date, then to ":" for volume, then to end for page #.

As far as I can tell, that's exactly what I'm supposed to do. But when I actually do the import, I get things like "; 50" in the volume field, or ": 101-103" in the page field. It doesn't seem to get rid of the punctuation or the space before the info.
This is hardly a huge problem, as I can fairly happily do that manually, but I thought it was supposed to be automatic. Is there some checkbox I haven't checked or something? According to the user guide, this shouldn't be happending, but it certainly seems to be...

Marcus
Jon
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Post by Jon »

Hi Enkidu,

You are doing everything correctly, almost. When you reach the punctuation, in the next entry you must *ignore* until the next thing you want to collect.

In your example, collect to . into Title. Then Ignore until letter. Then collect until ; as date (or whatever you like). This adds a little work, but it gives you much more flexibility.

Jon
Sonny Software
enkidu

Post by enkidu »

Thanks! Knew I was missing something simple! And thanks for a wonderful response time too!
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