Commas allowed in tags?

[kenirwin]

Hi folks,

Is there a way to use commas in tags? All of my data has last-name-first data (e.g. Irwin, Ken) that I’d like to use as tags. I found this discussion of the problem from 2010:
https://omeka.org/forums-legacy/topic/csv-import-and-commasquoation-marks/
but I didn’t find anything more recent.

In the 2010 conversation, “wanderingwill” wrote:
“So after looking at it some more, I determined that the issue is not a bug, but a restriction on our data model. In Omeka, tags cannot have commas in them. Commas are delimiters. The restriction is not specific to the Csv Import plugin.”

Another user pointed to an instance of commas being used in tags, suggesting that there might be a way around it, and also said they’d heard that someone was working on a plugin to address it.

I’ve considered some rendering shenanigans, e.g. having commas represented by an unusual set of characters (“ZZZ”) and then rendered as commas in the visual output, but that seems super fault-prone. Or perhaps substituting an ASCII comma with a Unicode comma variant: https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=COMMA

Are there conventional approaches to this problem that folks have found to work well?

Thanks
Ken

[miniol]

Have you tried to change the default tags separator form comma to i.e. semicolon ? You can use comma in tags if it is not set as default tag separator in Omeka general settings.

[kenirwin]

I’m able to create tags with commas, but the functionality doesn’t work – if you click on a tag, it fails to search correctly, and doesn’t even find the one article the tag is in.

So, yes, I can import them by using a semi-colon to separate tags, but they don’t work right.