Is the plus sign symbol inappropriately ignored on the Add Books page?

I attempted to catalogue my book, ISBN 0-201-53992-6. The correct title for this book is "The C++ Programming Language". I wound up with "The C Programming Language" instead. I also tried to tag it with "C++" and instead found it tagged with "C".

C and C++ are not the same computer language, though the latter is almost a proper superset of the former. Confusing the two is a bad thing (TM) for any software engineer or programmer cataloguing their language reference books.

When I modified my book (via "edit book", from the "add to your books" page), the changes were recorded as typed.

But the "add books" page (at https://www.librarything.com/addbooks) seems to be broken.

FWIW, the Library of Congress entry (which I used in adding the book) is not at fault - the title is correct in the "results from overcat" list on the "add to your books" page. The + signs are dropped after that point.

Also, the page for the work, at https://www.librarything.com/work/20136303, appears to be correct. At least, it appears correct when logged in as me, now that I've corrected my own copy; I haven't tested anything else.

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Editted to add: Identical misbehaviour with ISBN 0-201-39519-3, C++ for C Programmers by Ira Pohl

Very old bug https://www.librarything.com/topic/45871

>2 MarthaJeanne: That report dates from 2008, which is rather depressing. OTOH, it's not in a forum devoted to bugs, so perhap Tim et al. never got it on their list.

I woke up that dormant thread, in case that will help, but I hope there's a better way to bring it to the attention of the developers. (Maybe simply posting about it here, if I'm lucky?)

Hmm, this series page https://www.librarything.com/nseries/14721/C-In-Depth-Series appears to be mistitled, possibly because of a similar bug on some series page - all but one of the book covers mention C++ but the series is inappropriately named C In-Depth series

I don't feel confident in my ability to edit a series without breaking something; can anyone point me to a forum where I'll find people who do have this confidence?

I reported the tagging aspect as a bug in 2007 (!) and was told it was already a "known issue":

https://www.librarything.com/topic/16488

>5 lorax: It looks like when you reported the problem, it was somewhat more thoroughly broken. I can currently put the + symbol into tags and titles on the "edit books" page, but not on the "add books" page. Maybe an attempt was made to fix this, but the same code occured on multiple pages (rather than being called as a subroutine from a common source), and not all of them were found.

Based on a hint at https://www.librarything.com/topic/16488, I looked at a page of LibraryThing where the + sign behaves as a naive person would wish, even in tags.

Go to your catalog page, and select tags. E.g. https://www.librarything.com/catalog/ArlieS If you click on a tag with a + in it, you go to a page listing all the books you have with that tag, just as if you click on a tag with no + in it.

The URL for the page for my tag C++ looks like this: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/ArlieS&tag=C%252B%252B Note the %252B, which is an encoding of the symbol +

I turned on "view page source" and looked at the frame called catalog_tags.php

In the page source for the framewith the clickable list of tags, there are three occurences of the name of each tag. One of these is part of the URL embedded in a link, and this one - but not the other two - has the + signs in the % syntax. The other two are plain text.

Here's a tag that's entirely text:

<div class="tag" id="t506" onmouseover="ti(506, 'abuse', 1)">
<div class="tagword"><a href="/catalog/ArlieS&tag=abuse" target="_top"><img src="/pics/silk/tag_green.png" width="16" height="16">abuse</a> (1)</div>

And here's the offending C++ tag, which works completely correctly on this page AFAICT:

<div class="tag" id="t1043464" onmouseover="ti(1043464, 'C++', 1)">
<div class="tagword"><a href="/catalog/ArlieS&tag=C%252B%252B" target="_top"><img src="/pics/silk/tag_green.png" width="16" height="16">C++</a> (5)</div>

Note that this page is computer generated, presumably from a database. Also that I never explicitly used %252B anywhere.

For my next trick, I went to https://www.librarything.com/addbooks searched for 0-201-53992-6 with two tags to be added automatically - the same two in my example above.

I then looked at the page source.

This was disappointing. I was able to find an image of the book cover in a resource named Images/coverthing_new_dynamic.php But I could not find any plain text occurence of either tag, or of a word known to be in the title and not containing the symbol +

FWIW, this page doesn't appear to use frames, and appears to be mostly javascipt, along with several images, one of which is in a file with a php extension, which seems odd to me.

One more note - the click that would generate the bad add runs document.form0.submit() - or document.form1.submit() - etc. - depending on which of the many results from Overcat I were to click on.

I failed to find anything named form0, form1 or similar - but did find 14 occurences of the string "form", two of them as <form ... - in the only one of the 20+ parts of this page that my developer console thinks is a "document".

I am not a web programmer. I can write basic html, and have been known to write scripts to generate html, but I know no javascript, and I usually work on low level engine code, not anything at this level.

So unless I have another bright idea, I'll have to give up on assisting with source level debugging here. (No, I don't think I care enough to learn javascript.)

But I'd still really like to see this bug fixed (!)

Your bug report is noted! Thanks for the workup, too. I don't believe developers will have time this week as we're pushing to get a major thing out, and next month is riddled with summer vacations for staff, but perhaps someone will be able to take a look sooner than later. I'm not sure why this bug has been allowed for so long (since 2007?!) but I'll keep pestering about it. Feel free to pester me periodically, as well. :)

>9 kristilabrie: Thank you Kristi

bump

I believe this is fixed now - you can now add "C++ programming language" and you get to keep your pluses in the title.

Adding tags including pluses should also be working.

Oh, and searching library data sources for titles with + should also work.

Cross-referencing to https://www.librarything.com/topic/349508 which involves the addition of extraneous + symbols, and appears to have started only after this was reported to be fixed.