[chaley]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Some more info. Having seen Doc's post, I've just looked at my Series groupings.

Step1. Of 106 books, 2 appeared under the wrong Series first letter. Both had Series value Inspector Alan Grant, but appeared under 'G' instead of 'I'. This is very odd as I also have books with Series values Inspector Banks and Inspector Vaara which are both correctly grouped under 'I'. In the calibre library Tag Browser panel, all these books are correctly grouped under Series 'I'.

Ignoring the "Inspector Al" in front, we see that "an Grant" became "Grant" (under G). Before the "huh", read on.

My Tweaks, from day 1 of them being available, have been set as:
title_series_sorting = 'strictly_alphabetic'
save_template_title_series_sorting = 'strictly_alphabetic'
and have never changed since.

Step 2. In calibre I opened Edit Metadata and saved (with no changes) so that the metadata.opf file has today's date. After reconnecting CC, both books are still incorrectly grouped under 'G'.

Did CC actually transfer the metadata? It could be that Kovid has gotten quite clever and not updated last_modified if there weren't any changes.

Step 3. In calibre I changed one of the two books to have Series value Inspector Grant. After reconnecting CC this changed book is now correctly grouped under 'I'. Then I changed the 2nd book in the same way. Both books now correctly grouped in CC.

OK, this change would definitely have changed last_mod, so metadata would transfer.

Step 4. In calibre change both books back to their original Series value of Inspector Alan Grant. Reconnect CC, both books still correctly grouped under 'I' with their original value of Inspector Alan Grant.

Conclusion, I've no idea

goodness reigns.

I have a theory. Going through both calibre and CC, I find that if a book was added to CC (and thus to calibre) via CC's "scan for new books", CC used an incorrect regexp to guess at the series sort. It did not anchor the pattern, so the (A|An|The) could appear anywhere, as described above for "Inspector Alan Grant". This incorrect metadata would be stored in CC when it sent the book to calibre. If that metadata was never changed in calibre then the error would remain in CC. Is there any significant chance that this scenario fits the two books?

The only other thing I can think of is that there could have been a short time when calibre "incorrectly" computed the series sort. Any books sent to CC during that time would have the wrong value. When the problem was corrected (if ever there was a problem), calibre would immediately start to use the right values but CC would be stuck with the wrong ones. I know I am grasping at straws, but that is about all I have left. Other than the one case described above, CC gets that value from calibre, and I can't see any way that calibre would generate the wrong value.