Strip leading and trailing spaces from most/all fields

[zorae]

Proposal

When editing an author, work, or edition, invisible characters such as spaces and tabs should be automatically stripped from the beginning and end of a field.

Justification

Problem: Librarians may accidentally include leading/trailing spaces, which – if not manually removed – are saved to the database. This can lead to e.g. author names looking weird.

Impact: Librarians can save time, e.g. when pasting names from external sites.

Note: We would have to check for edge cases in which leading/trailing spaces have a legitimate use and exclude those fields.

Breakdown

Requirements Checklist

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Related files

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[QuangPhung15]

Hi @zorae,

I want to work on this issue. It is a useful improvement to streamline data entry and prevent formatting errors. I'll review potential edge cases where leading/trailing spaces might be necessary and ensure the implementation excludes those fields.

Please let me know if this feature has any additional details or preferences!

[zorae]

Thanks @QuangPhung15!
I’ve been pondering if spaces should a) be stripped immediately upon deselecting a field, or b) only upon saving changes.

a) has the advantage that it gives librarians immediate feedback so they know they don‘t have to manually remove spaces. But I foresee that this could be annoying for multi-line fields like bio or work description where a librarian might start writing something, add a space or line break at the end and deselect the field before coming back to continue writing.

Option a) would have to be implemented client-side, while b) could be either client- or server-side.

[bitnapper]

Would it also be possible to substitute multiple space characters to only one, something like: s/\S+/ /g?

[mekarpeles]

@zorae can we please be enumerative of the exact fields you believe this should be applied to? Even if we start with only a few, that is more likely to make forward progress than requiring folks who don't have librarian context / experience from having to figure out what fields we might be talking about. Thank you!

Also, as @scottbarnes mentioned to me in a passing, there may be edge cases, like author, where there are things like ", Sr." or other prefixes that end up complicating these rules.

[zorae]

@mekarpeles Some fields I would find particularly useful are author name, bio, date of birth, date of death, edition title, work title, and work description.

@scottbarnes Can you clarify what the issue would be with the “, Sr.” suffix? It ends with a period, so I don’t see how a rule that strips out whitespace at the end of a field would affect it.

[scottbarnes]

I apologize, I think I misheard this when the issue came up as including the stripping of periods.