Bug#704527: biber: Character "(" not allowed in key although valid in BiBTeX
reassign 704527 libbtparse1
tags 704527 + moreinfo
stop
On 02.04.2013 14:55, Harri Kiiskinen wrote:
Hi Harri,
> biber does not seem to accept the character "(" in a bibtex key.
> This is rather irritating, as the old bibtex did accept it along some
> other non-letter characters. This may of course be a conscious choice
> of the developers, but in any case it breaks the backwards
> compatibility of the databases (and for me, a lot of documents) and
> perhaps should be investigated. In older versions of biber there was
> an option to select a different type of parser, which in fact did
> circumvent the problem, but this option has obviously been removed.
>
> All the best,
>
Sorry, late response!
I tried to find some informations about this. The main statement (as
already written by Mark J. Nelson <mjas@itu.dk>): there is no real well
defined syntax for this. In [1] I found the statement that "(" is an
active character in biber, used to start an entry, and hence can't be
used in a key words. On the other hand I could replace the curly
delimiter braces in the bibtex file by "(" and bibtex still can process
the file. So I'd still vote for "regression".
[1] further describes how to use parentheses in aliases. Other matches
in the Internet suggest to replace the "()" by uncritical characters, in
[2] anybody provided python scripts to do so.
For now I reassign the issue to libbtparse1. Do you have an opinion for
this or a valid source to decide if we look at a bug or a missing
feature? Many thanks!
Hilmar
[1]
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/96454/using-bibtex-keys-containing-parentheses-with-biber
[2] https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/1272
--
http://www.hilmar-preusse.de.vu/ #206401 http://counter.li.org
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