Shortening forename of authors containing UTF-8 special characters does not work

I found out that this is on the todo list, so I volunteer. Before starting I want to make sure not do duplicate effort. This is the first line of the function theme_biblio_page_number():

global $alnum, $alpha, $cntrl, $dash, $digit, $graph, $lower, $print, $punct, $space, $upper, $word, $patternModifiers; // defined in 'transtab_unicode_charset.inc.php' and 'transtab_latin1_charset.inc.php'

I cannot find those two files in biblio and the global variables are not defined elsewhere. Is there any chance to get those two files?

Hi Ron!

Using drupal_substr for shortening the fornames does return only the first initial. I don't know why the regular expressions did not work for you because I almost did the same and it worked for me. I'll write some unit tests for the function. Would you give me the names that caused the function to fail?

Stefan

No. I replaced the character classes with the unicode properties (you did it even more accurately than I) and I had no more problems with shortening fore names. Our database already has several thousand authors and I haven't encountered any errors yet. I am going to try your version from CVS.

I have tested your version using the regular expressions instead of drupal_substr.

if (!empty($author['firstname'])) {
      if ($options['shortenGivenNames']) // if we're supposed to abbreviate given names
      {
        // within initials, reduce all full first names (-> defined by a starting uppercase character, followed by one ore more lowercase characters)
        // to initials, i.e., only retain their first character

        $author['firstname'] = preg_replace("/([$upper])[$lower]+/$patternModifiers", "\\1", $author['firstname']);
        //$author['firstname'] = drupal_substr($author['firstname'], 0, 1);
      }
    }

It works for me for authors with and without non-ascii characters in their forenames.

The Unicode character properties are available since PHP versions 4.4.0 and 5.1.0: http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.php#regexp.reference.unicode
It is also possible that your preg library is compiled without UTF-8 support.