Warning: this software is in development and might change significantly before v1.0 is released.

When mass updating SFX target portfolios via the dataloader, we need a clean, tab separated list of ISBNs or ISSNs. Usually, we have to fetch the identifiers manually from messy lists (CSV, TSV, Excel), which have different standards for different publishers. The identifiers we need are sometimes merged in single fields, arbitrarily separated by different delimiters each time.

We start with this...

KBID,Title,PrintISBN,OnlineISBN,DOI
63601,Social Capital,978-1-60692-973-5,978-0-511-30338-8|978-1-60876-294-1,
103645,Georgia: Russian Foreign Energy Policy and Implications for Georgia's Energy Security (Global market briefings),978-1-905050-35-2,978-1-280-48056-0|978-1-905050-84-0,
117409,"Cellular Neural Networks and Their Applications: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and Their Applications: Institute of Applied Physics, Johann Wolfgang Go",978-981-238-121-7,978-1-281-92935-8|978-981-277-679-2,

...aiming for this:

Datalo parses the first list in search of valid identifiers and generates the second automatically within seconds.

Datalo requires PHP 7. You will also need to have composer installed in your system in order to install the script.

Install datalo globally on your system with composer. Open your terminal and digit:

$ composer global require gpaddis/datalo

After the installation, datalo will be available in any directory. Make sure to place the $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your $PATH so the datalo executable can be located by your system.

Use the command datalo isbn to process a list of eBooks (passed as the first argument, in our case: eBook_list.csv) and datalo issn for a list of journals. The second argument is the destination file you want to generate: destination_file.txt.

$ datalo isbn eBook_list.csv destination_file.txt

The script will detect the delimiter, extract all valid ISBNs from your source file and save them in the destination file. If the file already exists, you will get a warning. You can overwrite an existing file by setting the option --force:

$ datalo isbn eBook_list.csv destination_file.txt --force

If you don't specify an activation status, all identifiers are flagged as ACTIVE by default in the second column. You can set a custom status (ACTIVE / INACTIVE) or add any string using the option --status followed by a word or a sentence enclosed in "quotation marks":

$ datalo isbn eBook_list.csv destination_file.txt --force --status "eBook list updated on 12.01.2017"

To save only the list of identifiers, set the --status explicitly to NONE.

If the delimiter-autodetection does not work, maybe the file has an unusual delimiter (say... pipe: |). In this case, you can use the option --delimiter to set a custom delimiter:

$ datalo isbn eBook_list.csv destination_file.txt --force --status INACTIVE --delimiter |

You will have to make sure that you are actually using the correct delimiter to avoid unexpected or partial results.

Copyright (c) 2017 Gianpiero Addis - MIT License