[VuFind-General] Blanks appearing in Language facet

[Lovins, D. <dan...@ya...>]

Hi all.

We discovered something here that I was planning to report on JIRA as a bug, but thought I'd bring it up first on the list.

If we search the following book in our database: "Hoffmanns Erzählungen" http://tinyurl.com/bo5w4w, we notice a blank line in the language facet indicating 3 hits. There's no way to click open the facet directly since there's nothing there to click on, but my colleague Chuck Riley was able to determine that, because they were cataloged according to an earlier version of the MARC 21 standard, records like this have multiple 041 subfield $a language codes that are not separated by subfield delimiters. So, for example, an item that includes English, German, French, and Spanish language would have "041 $a enggerfrespa" for an. The latest version of MARC 21 specifies repeatable subfield $a delimiters (e.g., "041 $eng $a ger $a fre $a spa"), but this is a fairly recent change, which means there are many legacy records. When the delimiters are present, VuFind parses and displays the languages correctly. When not, VuFind seems to represent the undefined string of characters as blanks.

We're thinking about trying to add the subfield delimiters retroactively, but we're also wondering if others have noticed this issue, and, if so, whether anyone's found a way to represent the concatenated language codes as something other than a blank facet.

Thanks for your help.

Daniel