It could be, i'm not sure. I also remember that i was changing the short id generation algorithm when RAS was already running and several such super-short ids were already registered. I couldn't change them since we consider them permanent, but we should do something to avoid it in the future. 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.) -ivan On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Sune Karlsson<sune.karlsson@oru.se> wrote:

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.

/Sune -- Sune Karlsson                       New e-mail: Sune.Karlsson@oru.se Professor of Statistics Handelshögskolan/Swedish Business School Örebro University, SE-70182 Örebro, Sweden Phone +46 19 301257 http://www.oru.se/esi/karlsson http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pka1.htm

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