Bug#704527: biber: Character "(" not allowed in key although valid in BiBTeX

[Harri Kiiskinen]

Package: biber
Version: 0.9.9+release-1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

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,

Harri Kiiskinen

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages biber depends on:
ii  libdata-compare-perl                    1.22-0.1
ii  libdata-dump-perl                       1.21-1
ii  libdate-simple-perl                     3.03.03-1+b3
ii  libfile-slurp-unicode-perl              0.7.1-1
ii  libipc-run3-perl                        0.045-1
ii  liblist-allutils-perl                   0.03-1
ii  liblist-moreutils-perl                  0.33-1+b1
ii  liblog-log4perl-perl                    1.29-1
ii  liblwp-protocol-https-perl              6.03-1
ii  libreadonly-perl                        1.03-4
ii  libregexp-common-perl                   2011121001-1
ii  libtext-bibtex-perl                     0.63-1
ii  libunicode-collate-perl                 0.89-1
ii  libwww-perl                             6.04-1
ii  libxml-libxml-simple-perl               0.91-1
ii  libxml-libxslt-perl                     1.77-1
ii  libxml-writer-string-perl               0.1-1
ii  perl                                    5.14.2-20
ii  perl-modules [libunicode-collate-perl]  5.14.2-20

Versions of packages biber recommends:
ii  biblatex             1.7-1
ii  libreadonly-xs-perl  1.04-2+b3

biber suggests no packages.

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