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

[David Bremner]

control: tag -1 wontfix upstream

Harri Kiiskinen <harri.kiiskinen at utu.fi> writes:

> 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.

I forwarded your request to the libbtparse maintainer [1]. Unfortunately
it looks like your problem will not be fixed in libbtparse.  I don't
know it's worth persuing upstream with biber or not. Maybe we could at
least ask biber to document their (inherited) incompatibility?

[1]: https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125914