Adding book to collection alters alphabetization

When I add a book already in my catalog to another collection, it makes it alphabetize by the first letter, even if that is incorrect.

To reproduce:
- Find a book where the title starts with "A" (When I tested this, I used A Comedy of Terrors by Michael Innes, which was correctly alphabetized under C. It was alphabetized there automatically; I hadn't used the drop-down to set which character to alphabetize from.)
- Click on the "edit book" pencil icon
- Add the book to any collection it's not already in
- Hit "save"
- The book is now alphabetized under A

If I go in manually and set the alphabetization character, that fixes the problem. However, if I change the collections again, it removes my manually set alphabetization.

This also happens with titles that start with The. Which is most of them. :(

EDIT: This is happening in my catalog.

>1 casvelyn:
You've provided a lot of nice extra detail but this recent bug has already been reported - https://www.librarything.com/topic/328818

>2 newcrossbooks: Thanks! I tried to check for previous reports, but I missed that one.

Closed as a duplicate.

Kristi: I need a steps-to-reproduce. When I edit the book, or edit the book to change the collection, it doesn't change the sort character.

(Kristi called this out to me separately, so I'm reopening as needs discussion.)

Okay, I'm actually no longer seeing the issue in existence. The issue I was able to reproduce was:
1. Click to edit a book
2. See that the sort character drop-down menu shows no selection
3. When you save your changes, the sort character gets reset to null, or 1. (Unless, of course, you set the sort character deliberately before saving.)

Step 2 is no longer happening for me. Can anyone else verify?

Yes, I think it resolved itself somehow. It reset for me too when changing collections for a few days, but now seems to be back to normal.

Okay! Closing for now but please re-open if needed.

Okay, I think I have fixed this. There was an error in the definite-article-stripping function. It didn't affect the books I was working with. I think therefore it affected only books whose "sort character" wasn't previously set. In any case, the problem should be fixed.