Trim auto-generated labels

Thanks for the detailed description! Your suggestion sounds good to me.

Any reason to address multiple adjacent spaces between non-empty token values, too?– like, in the above example, when the middle name is blank. The rendered label doesn't look wrong (because adjacent spaces get "collapsed," so to speak), but there are extra spaces between field values in the rendered label markup. Does this "matter"??

Good question. I don't know of any cases where people rely on having multiple spaces in an entity label, so I guess we could try to clean up consecutive spaces as well.

(Depending on the reception of this idea, I'd also offer an edit to the description/help text for the auto_entitylabel_pattern textarea to inform users of leading/trailing whitespace trimming.)

I don't think that's necessary.

Attached is a patch I made for version 7.x-1.1 (just because that's what we're using, so that I could get something up for our site ASAP). If there's positive feedback toward this suggestion, I'll create/submit the patch for the latest dev version the way you're supposed to.

That would be awesome! I'm looking forward to the patch! :)

If it's possible I'd prefer having only one preg_replace, as the function is not particularly fast afaik. Apart from that I'm sitll ok with the change :-) Maybe this site can help with constructing the correct regular expression.

Okay, thanks. I'll have another look myself before commit. :)

I'm on holiday at the moment so it'll probably be at least another week or two before I get around to it.

@alisonjo2786: are you still working on a patch? What's the latest? :)

Hello, any progress here? Thanks!

Adding a related issue, where you could use the proposed alter hook to trim the spaces off of the title as an alternative approach.

Something like this should work, leveraging the new alter hook:

function MYMODULE_auto_entitylabel_title_alter(&$titles, $entity) {
  foreach ($titles as $language => $title) {
    $titles[$language] = trim($titles[$language]);
  }
}

Sadly, #2618042: Allow title alter in auto_entitylabel_set_title never made it into the D8 port, so there's no alternative solution there.

This exact problem keeps hitting me every time I install this module. I end up writing a custom token to do the conditional check if the tokens I'm using are missing a value, but an option to just trim() the label would be way better.

Trying to strip consecutive whitespace inside the label seems like more of an edge case. It's sad that this issue has lingered for so long trying to sort out the most elegant way for that.

That said, entity label generation is an extremely rare operation in the life of a website. If we were regenerating the labels on every page view, I'd care about performance. As this is done once when an entity is created or edited, it could call preg_replace() 20 times and it wouldn't matter.

To get the ball re-started in D8 (and to have a publicly available patch for folks that want to safely deploy this to live sites), here's a trivial patch to add a simple trim option. If I'm feeling inspired, maybe I'll give it some further love to handle stray whitespace inside a label, too. I'm not sure this even needs to be a config option, but since that was so easy, I started there.

Here's a version that converts 2 or more whitespace chars to a single space after we trim().

Whoops, sorry, failed to attach. ;)

And, if you think the config option is stupid (which it probably is), here's a version that does it automatically (with a better code comment when it happens.

Let's get one of these into the 8.x-2.x branch ASAP. Anyone up for a review and testing? Works great for my use cases on my dev sites.

Thanks!
-Derek

Sorry, I was being hasty with the config option. It worked because I put it directly in my dev site's config. ;) Patches #19 and #21 don't actually work via the UI, and don't add the 'trim' option to the config schema like they should.

But, I think #22 is the way to go, anyway. I can't imagine anyone not wanting this to happen automatically. If we need it, I (or someone else) can make #21 do the right things (and perhaps harvest the code comment from #22 when the trim() is happening).

Cheers,
-Derek

I agree 100% that this patch is needed. Tested and seems to work exactly as intended.

@alisonjo2786: dww is a long term Drupal (and core) contributor and very accredited Drupal community member. You can consider his approach and reports to be qualified by any means. (EDIT: seems the previous user has changed the comment afterwards so this intial answer of me makes no sense no more.)

The most important question in the moment is if this patch still applies against latest Drupal core (8.6.x and 8.7.x -dev) If you could test this (I am on the road atm), then we can push this to get committed ASAP. I am in contact with @bforchhammer in the meantime.

Set this to major since this can be considered as a "MUST" have feature for pattern based title generation.

Just to let you know (FYI): The "make base fields managable" task in Drupal core makes a lot progress ATM with a chance for 8.7 and will hopefully render title field more flexible in the near future.

#22 Looks good to me, applies cleanly and works well.

Thanks!

Follow-up: #3542214: Trimming functionality for double spaces is in incorrect order, may leave a leading / trailing space