Template for folder/filename for Author/Title with Chinese characters

[ctop]

Hi there,
Not sure if this is the right place to post, so please bear with me.
I am trying to construct a template that will create a folder hierarchy on the device. I want to have it start with the first character of author_sort, then on the next level author_sort and finally the book title. It looks like this:

{author_sort:.1}/{author_sort}/{title}

This works very nice for books in English or German, but I also have Chinese and Japanese books in my library. For a Chinese book (Author: 李百药 Title: 二十四史-北齐书), it will come out like this:

Li/Li Bai Yao/Er Shi Si Shi -Bei Qi Shu.epub

This somehow in the background converts the Chinese characters to an alphabetic representation. This part is fine with me, because I understand it wants to work across platforms. However, this conversion should be applied *before* getting the first character, because the Latin representation of one Chinese character will typically be more than one character. So what I expect it should like like is as follows:

L/Li Bai Yao/Er Shi Si Shi -Bei Qi Shu.epub

Is there a way to achieve this? Or has this to be fixed in Calibre?

All the best,

Ctop

[davidfor]

I think the following will work:

{:'substr(transliterate(field("author_sort")),0,1)'}/{author_sort}/{title}

I have one book in my library with a Japanese title and author. The above produced a "W" for the first character when I used the Template editor. I haven't tried sending it to a device.

[ctop]

Wow, indeed it does work beautifully! Thank you so much!

Ctop