Create a user interface and accompanying DB methods to clean tags (remove commas, colons, slashes, ...)

[Robert Jäschke]

Many users post tags which contain commas, colons, slashes, dashes, etc. and only afterwards recognize that they would like to clean those tags (i.e., remove those characters).

Therefore, we would like to add the possibility for users to automatically clean there tags - remove those characters. Ideally, the interface augments the "edit_tags" page and allows users to choose from characters which they would like to remove/replace.

To design a good and intuitive interface is one thing, to do the job efficiently on the database is another thing.

The backend methods must touch all tables which pertain tags (tag, tas and group_tas, what about tag relations?) and must do this efficiently. In general, a lot of rows must be updated and the question is, how to do this? Get them all from DB and then scan them in Java for characters to be updated and then update the corresponding TAS? Or let the DB do the job (e.g., with REPLACE: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-functions.html#function_replace)?

Also: take care of timestamps of updated/date columns!

[Robert Jäschke]

Another feature could be to transform all tags to lower case ...