Updated: I missed a ‘?’ in the original code that pushed a single cutter into the second-cutter position. Fixed below.
Crap. Update 2: Initial letters can be three characters long. Regexp and output changed.
LoC Call numbers tend to be a mess, and I’ve been working this morning trying to normalize them for easy string comparison.
The perl function below takes a call number (with some level of sloppiness) and returns a string suitable for comparisons with other strings returned by the function. It outputs stuff like this:
E E 0000.0000 0000 0000 E 184 .A1 G78 E 0184.0000A 1000G 7800 E184.A2 G78 1967 E 0184.0000A 2000G 7800 1967 E184.A2 G78 1970 E 0184.0000A 2000G 7800 1970 EA EA0000.0000 0000 0000 EA 10 EA0010.0000 0000 0000 EA 10 1970 EA0010.0000 0000 0000 1970 EA10 B7 EA0010.0000B 7000 0000 EA 10.B7.G8 EA0010.0000B 7000G 8000 EA10.5 EA0010.5000 0000 0000
The code, in perl, follows:
sub normalizeLC {
- my $lc = uc(shift);
- $lc =~ /^
- \s*
- ([A-Z]{1,3}) # alpha
- \s*
- ( # optional numbers
- \d+
- (?: \s*\.\s*\d+)? # …with optional decimal point
- )?
- \s*
- (?: # optional cutter
- \.? \s*
- ([A-Z]+) # cutter letter
- \s*
- (\d+)? # cutter numbers
- )?
- (?: # optional cutter
- \.? \s*
- ([A-Z]+) # cutter letter
- \s*
- (\d+)? # cutter numbers
- )?
- \s*
- (.*?) # everthing else
- \s*$
- /x;
- my ($alpha, $num, $c1alpha, $c1num, $c2alpha, $c2num, $extra) = ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7);
- $c1num .= 0 x (4 - length($c1num)); # Pad out to four decimal places
- $c2num .= 0 x (4 - length($c2num)); # ditto
- $extra = ' ' . $extra if ($extra);
- return sprintf("%-3s%09.4f%-2s%4s%-2s%4s%s", $alpha, $num, $c1alpha, $c1num, $c2alpha, $c2num, $extra);
- }
3 Comments
The first alphabetical characters can be 3 letters, not just 2. For example, KJA147 .M685 2007 (see http://www2.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/record/NCSU2041714).
What are you working on? Is this a part of the “foundation for building an effective means to virtually browse the library’s collection“?
I adapted it for JavaScript: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dfulmer/api/lc.html
Emily — fixed. Thanks.
David — I need normalized call numbers to check for inclusion in High Level Browse categories, which have call numbers as start- and end-points. Virtual browsing is another possible application, though — I’ll have to stick normalized call numbers into our VUfind installation.