Bug#747519: bibtool: "Symbol does not start with a letter" random errors with pipe

[Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net>]

Control: retitle -1 bibtool: silent corruption / "Symbol does not start with a letter" random errors with pipe

On 2014-05-10 11:28:37 +0200, Jerome BENOIT wrote:
> Meanwhile, it appears that putting a sufficiently long
> `print.line.length' fixes the issue:
> a length of 255 for the sent material does the trick.

Thanks. It also seems to solve silent corruption I've also noticed
yesterday, but I think that's directly related.

For instance, here's what I got with bibtool:

===================================================================
--- other.bib   (revision 99)
+++ other.bib   (working copy)
@@ -382,8 +382,8 @@
 }
 
 @Unpublished{    alias:ensl-00549682,
-  author       = {Alias, Christophe and Pasca, Bogdan and Plesco,
-                 Alexandru},
+  author       = {Alias, Christophe and Pasca, Bogdan and Plesco, Alexandru}
+                 ^?,
   title                = {{Automatic Generation of FPGA-Specific Pipelined
                  Accelerators}},
   keywords     = {High-level synthesis ; Polytope model ; Pipelined

where ^? is the DEL character (7F).

I suspect that the "Symbol does not start with a letter" error appears
when such a corrupt output is fed to a second bibtool invocation with
a pipe, as indeed, the DEL character is not a letter.

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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