[RAS] short short-id problem

[Thomas Krichel]

  Sune Karlson writes

> I just stumbled across what might be a bug (or feature 8-) in how
> short-ids are generated. It is my understanding that the short-id is
> generated by concatenating 'p', the first two ascii characters in the
> last name and a sequence number. But there is at least one registered
> person with less than two ascii characters in the registered last
> name, http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pa1.htm, leading to an
> unexpected form for the short-id 'pa1'.
> 
> It is probably highly unusual but I guess possible for someone to have
> a "western" last name with no ascii characters. If such a person
> registers and does not provide an "english" version of the name we
> could end up with a short-id 'p1' and that causes problems given the
> way the files are organized in the per archive.

  Ivan Kurmanov writes

> i guess we could use "zz" as the default prefix, if the lastname does
> not provide us with enough letters. (and a similar string for
> non-personal short-ids.)

  Could _ be used?

  I could try a patch, then test it.

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
                                               skype: thomaskrichel