#830 clean by removing punctuation marks / cite key generator

[Jan David Hauck]

Hello,

In a future release, would you consider adding to the Cite Key generator (and maybe also AutoFile) a "clean by removing" option that removes all non-alphanumeric characters from the generated CiteKey? Or a field where the user could specify the characters to be removed?
Especially when including parts of the Title field in cite keys that have all kinds of punctuation characters, quotation marks, etc. it'd be great if they wouldn't show up in the cite key/filename.

Thanks!

Jan

[Christiaan Hofman]

It;s really not feasible within the current format to add all kinds of specialized cleaning operations. It's also not really possible within that format. We have to draw the lone somewhere.

[Jan David Hauck]

OK, understandable :)

I assume it would be possible via an AppleScript hook? Do you know if anyone has maybe come up with a script for something like that? I couldn't find anything on the wiki, but I remember there was someone proposing a solution to something similar on the list some time ago — just can't find it ...

[Christiaan Hofman]

It would be possible using a script hook. I wouldn't know an example though, but it should not be very difficult. Removing characters is pretty simple (you can add any characters you like):

on removePunctuation(theString)
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {".", ",", ";"}
set theStringComponents to text items of theString
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
return theStringComponents as text
end removeCharacters

And the basic skeleton of a script hook is on the Wiki, so you can easily insert something like the above. (For auto file it may be a little bit harder, because you probably want to keep path extensions).

[Jan David Hauck]

Thank you very much!
That is helpful, I should be able to figure this out!