[Bug]: Published year not displaying on some scraped books if date is encoded as yyyy-mm-dd

[tehguitarist]

Describe the issue

This is something I noticed sometime around v2.4, but I noticed some books didn't have published years, and when they were quick matched, the year didn't populate. When doing a manual match, the year shows up as the year, with some text underneath saying "Currently: yyyy-mm-dd"

It would be good to either have a method to migrate these dates to years, or for ABS to ignore the trailing numbers, given all years should be 4 characters. I suppose an edge case might be mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy, so a test could be used to check if the year is at the front or back, looking for the dashes, or if the 4 characters fall between -5000 to 3000 (to cover first recorded books, into the next thousand years).

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Encode the date of a book as yyyy-mm-dd e.g 2013-1-1
2. Observe that there is no date in the Published Date metadata field under Edit Metadata on an audiobook.
3. Observe in manual matching that it is listed as "Currently 2013.1.1

Audiobookshelf version

2.5.0

How are you running audiobookshelf?

Docker

[tehguitarist]

Upon some investigation, it looks like many tags have Published Year as the published date. I'll see if I can drum up a python script to fix this, if it's not in scope for ABS

[nichwall]

Is this similar? https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf/issues/2258#issuecomment-1783913722

[tehguitarist]

I don't think so. Looking at one of the newly created metadata.json files from the recent update I'm seeing this:

"publishedYear": "2023-01-01", "publishedDate": null,

So the fields are just back to front. This script can be used to fix it - I'll probably combine it with a bash find command like the below (linux/mac)

Just pass the path of the file as an argument Here is an example script to run it if the below code is saved somewhere as datefixer.py

for i in "$(find ~+ -name 'metadata.json' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 echo)"; 
do
    python /path/to/datefixer.py $i
done

import json
import os
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('filePath')
args = parser.parse_args()
filename = args.filePath

with open(filename, 'r') as f:
    data = json.load(f)
    if (data['publishedDate'] is None and data['publishedYear'] is not None):
        data['publishedDate'] = data['publishedYear']
    if ('-' not in data['publishedDate'][:4]):
        print("true!!")
        data['publishedYear'] = data['publishedDate'][:4]
    elif ('-' not in data['publishedYear'][-4:]):
        data['publishedYear'] = data['publishedDate'][-4:]

os.remove(filename)
with open(filename, 'w') as f:
    json.dump(data, f, indent=4)

Though now I test it, I realise modifying the metadata.json doesn't change the metadata in ABS (without rescanning).

[advplyr]

Currently published date isn't used anywhere in the UI

[scapix]

https://github.com/id3/ID3v2.4/blob/master/id3v2.4.0-changes.txt id3v2.4 uses new frames for dates (<=v2.3 ones are deprecated), with following formats allowed: yyyy yyyy-MM yyyy-MM-dd yyyy-MM-ddTHH yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss same issue happens with mp4/m4a. some tools enforce strict format e.g. exiftool response to trying to set "Content Create Date" which is presumably used for "Publishing Year" in ABS

Warning: Invalid date/time (use YYYY:mm:dd HH:MM:SS[.ss][+/-HH:MM|Z]) in ItemList:ContentCreateDate (PrintConvInv)
Nothing to do.

would it be possible to strip everything after "year"?