Re: [Bibdesk-users] keywords containing commas, e.g. chemicals

[Christiaan H. <chr...@we...>]

On 24 Aug 2006, at 5:36 AM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:

>
> On Aug 23, 2006, at 19:00, Michael McCracken wrote:
>
>>
>> On Aug 23, 2006, at 7:28 AM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Aug 23, 2006, at 02:10, Andreas Reinecke wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear List Members,
>>>>
>>>> I have to use names of chemicals as keywords. However, they often
>>>> contain commas, i.e. (2R, 3R)-butanediol, or 1, 3-dimethyl-2, 4- 
>>>> (1H,
>>>> 3H)quinazolinedione leading to a list of keywords that looks as
>>>> follows:
>>>>
>>>> (2R
>>>> 1
>>>> 3-dimethyl-2
>>>> 3H)quinazolinedione
>>>> 3R)-butanediol
>>>> 4-(1H
>>>>
>>>> Can settings of the keyword manager be changed to accept only the
>>>> semicolon as entry separator?
>>>> Is there any workaround which still allows copy-and-past
>>>> functionality or import from other databases leaving names of
>>>> chemicals as used in the standard nomenclature.
>>>
>>> There is no workaround for this at present; ",;:" and " and " are
>>> currently used to split lists of terms.  We could probably add a
>>> hidden pref for this case, though.
>>
>> I don't have any idea how hard or easy this would be (I haven't
>> looked at the keyword splitting code) -
>> *but*
>> how about allowing quoted keywords like this:
>>
>> keywd1, keywd1; "(2R, 3R)-butanediol" : "another:long:keyword"
>>
>> Does that sound feasible? It's similar to how flickr allows tags with
>> spaces in them...
>
> Possible, I suppose, but I don't have time to look at it myself.  The
> relevant code is -[BibItem groupsForField:] if anyone's interested;

and the add/remove/replace methods after it also depend on it.

> right now it uses -[NSString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:]
> (which just calls
> BDStringCreateComponentsSeparatedByCharacterSetTrimWhitespace()).  You
> could probably pre-scan it for quoted components, then split the rest
> by character set.
>
> Adam

Moreover keep in mind that what is used for keywords is used for  
grouping generic fields, if they're not marked as singleValued or  
person.

Christiaan