EditBug:10079 ISBN display/validation issue

• EditBug:10079 ISBN display/validation issue OPEN This is both a display and edit bug but I'll file just this report. There was a publication record with ISBN 0932322240 which is displayed as 0-932322-24-0. Someone edited it and changed other fields but not the ISBN. When they saved submitted the record the ISBN validator did not recognize it because the checksum is wrong (it should be 7) and so the record was saved as 0-932322-24-0. I saw the pub-update in the queue, spotted the hyphenated ISBN, and decided to follow up on this. The display logic displays “0-932322-24-0” as “ISBN-13: 978-2-322-240-” and there’s no ISBN: line. I hit edit-pub again and the logic gave me “978-2-322-240-” in the edit field!

I suspect the code to format ISBNs either should not hyphenate ISBNs with a bad checksum or the validator code should treat things that look exactly like an ISBN except for the bad checksum as an ISBN and remove the hyphens.

As for the record with 0932322240, the correct ISBN is 0921322240 and I’ve already fixed that in ISFDB though if you want to play with this I have a test pub you can use. Per Google ISFDB was the only place with 0932322240 (the bad ISBN) meaning the error was either during keying into ISFDB or a very old dissembler finding that was later corrected. (it’s also listed in ISFDB:Bad_ISBN_List) Marc Kupper 01:15, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

Wait. Wait. Wait. The software knows if the ISBN field is a valid ISBN or not, but that's it. How can it know that the user INTENDED to type a valid ISBN, but typed it wrong? That is, how does it differentiate between a bad ISBN and a catalog number? This is one of the reasons I like preceeding non-ISBNs with the '#' sign - then the software can know. Here's what we currently do:

• If the user types a valid ISBN without hyphens, it gets stored without hyphens, and gets diplayed with hyphens.
• If the user types a valid ISBN with hyphens, it gets stored without hyphens, and gets displayed with hyphens.
• If the user types an invalid ISBN or a catalog ID with hyphens, it gets stored exactly as entered (as the software can't tell the difference between an invalid ISBN and a catalog ID).
• If the user types an invalid ISBN without hyphens, it gets stored exactly as entered.

Are we saying that if the user entered a 10 digit ISBN, where the first 9 digits have values 0-9, and the last digits has values 0-9 or X, but the checksum is incorrect, that we SHOULD strip out any hyphens? Alvonruff 08:25, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)