Re: Preserving leading zeros

[William Denton <wtd@pobox.com>]

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On 28 May 2023, Berry, Charles wrote:

> Have you considered http://gewhere.github.io/org-bibtex ??
>
> Or using the approach therein, viz. use properties to store bib data in org?

That would be great for a smaller bibliography, but I'm dealing with over 2,400 
books.  They're in a simple database now, with a web front end I wrote over 
twenty years ago in Perl.  Amazingly it's worked ever since, maybe with one fix 
required along the way, but some update to a library or package broke it 
recently and I haven't figured out why yet.  Even if I do, I'm thinking it's 
time to get away from that code.

I don't feel like getting into the overhead of writing a new web-based system, 
so I might try managing the database through Org with R.  I was thinking I might 
add a new book by having a table like this, which the code would read and 
operate on:

|       isbn | title            | pub_date |
|------------+------------------+----------+
| 0006145396 | A Buyer's Market |     1952 |

I guess I could have the code pad the left with zeros if the ISBN is a number 
with fewer than 10 digits.  That way I'd see the right ISBN on the screen, and 
if Emacs removes the zeros they get put back before it's added to the 
catalogue.

Bill

--
William Denton
https://www.miskatonic.org/
Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.
Toronto, Canada
CO₂: 424.57 ppm (Mauna Loa Observatory, 2023-05-27)