[Tex/LaTex] Remove period when cross-referencing a section

cross-referencingsectioning

I'm writing a paper for an IET conference, and they have provided the latex class ecoc02 for formatting. In this format Sections appear with a period after the number:

  1. Introduction

but when I reference the section, I also get an unwanted period after the reference. Can I easily remove the period when cross-referencing sections?

For example:

\documentclass[12pt]{ecoc02}
\begin{document} 

\section{Introduction}
This is the introduction, Section \ref{sec:methods} is the methods section. Some conclusions are given in Section \ref{sec:conclusions}.

\section{Methods}\label{sec:methods}
This is the methods section. Section \ref{sec:method1} discusses the first result.

\subsection{Method 1}\label{sec:method1}
This is method 1.

\section{Conclusions}\label{sec:conclusions}
Something profound.

\end{document}

enter image description here

Best Answer

The class does \renewcommand\thesection {\@arabic\c@section.} and this is causing the undesired period in cross-references; this seems a bad design choice by the class author. If you want to avoid this, you can redefine \thesection to suppress the period and then you need to make some changes to \thesubsection, to the section entries in the ToC and to the section headings:

\documentclass[12pt]{IET02}

\usepackage{tocloft}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}
  {\normalfont\bfseries}{\thesection.}{0.5em}{}
\renewcommand\cftsecaftersnum{.} 
\renewcommand\thesection{\arabic{section}}
\renewcommand\thesubsection{\thesection.\arabic{subsection}}

\begin{document} 
\tableofcontents
\section{Introduction}
This is the introduction, Section \ref{sec:methods} is the methods section. Some conclusions are given in Section \ref{sec:conclusions}.

\section{Methods}\label{sec:methods}
This is the methods section. Section \ref{sec:method1} discusses the first result.

\subsection{Method 1}\label{sec:method1}
This is method 1.

\section{Conclusions}\label{sec:conclusions}
Something profound.

\end{document}

enter image description here

I don't know however if you are allowed to use these packages. You should inform the conference organizers about this problem with the class.

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