[Tex/LaTex] biber/biblatex source of “characters of junk”

biblatex

Response on StackOverflow suggested this query better here.

I've spent an hour or so searching this topic after another couple of hours trying to find the "bug" in my bibliography. The following Tex file and bibliography are almost minimal examples. Can anyone suggest what is wrong with either of the files? Thanks. JN

junk.tex:

\documentclass[11pt,english]{cv}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[
     backend=biber,
     style=numeric,
     natbib=true,
     sorting=none,
     url=true, 
     doi=true,
     eprint=false
]{biblatex}

\bibliography{test}

\begin{document}
\title{All publications and works}
\maketitle
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
test.bib:

@Misc{ quietpenguin,
  author  = {Nash, John C.},
  title = {{Quiet Penguin: an open design concept for discussion}},
  year = {2013},
  month = {June},
  note = {JNfile: 130630quietpenguin.pdf}
}

@article{bolkernonlin13,
 author = {Bolker, Benjamin M. and Gardner, Beth and Maunder, Mark 
 and Berg, Casper W. and Brooks, Mollie and Comita, Liza 
 and Crone, Elizabeth and Cubaynes, Sarah and Davies, Trevor 
 and de Valpine, Perry and Ford, Jessica and Gimenez, Olivier 
 and K\'ery, Marc and Kim, Eun Jung and Lennert-Cody, Cleridy 
 and Magnusson, Arni and Martell, Steve and Nash, John 
 and Nielsen, Anders and Regetz, Jim and Skaug, Hans 
 and Zipkin, Elise},
title = {Strategies for fitting nonlinear ecological models in R, AD Model Builder, and BUGS},
journal = {Methods in Ecology and Evolution},
volume = {4},
number = {6},
issn = {2041-210X},
pages = {501--512},
year = {2013},
note = {Report on special 2-session workshop at National Center for 
 Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA in 2012.
 JNfile: 13-bolker-strategies.pdf}
}

Best Answer

With just

@Misc{ quietpenguin,
  author  = {Nash, John C.},
  title = {{Quiet Penguin: an open design concept for discussion}},
  year = {2013},
  month = {June},
  note = {JNfile: 130630quietpenguin.pdf}
}

@article{bolkernonlin13,
 author = {Bolker, Benjamin M. and Gardner, Beth and Maunder, Mark 
 and Berg, Casper W. and Brooks, Mollie and Comita, Liza 
 and Crone, Elizabeth and Cubaynes, Sarah and Davies, Trevor 
 and de Valpine, Perry and Ford, Jessica and Gimenez, Olivier 
 and K\'ery, Marc and Kim, Eun Jung and Lennert-Cody, Cleridy 
 and Magnusson, Arni and Martell, Steve and Nash, John 
 and Nielsen, Anders and Regetz, Jim and Skaug, Hans 
 and Zipkin, Elise},
title = {Strategies for fitting nonlinear ecological models in R, AD Model Builder, and BUGS},
journal = {Methods in Ecology and Evolution},
volume = {4},
number = {6},
issn = {2041-210X},
pages = {501--512},
year = {2013},
note = {Report on special 2-session workshop at National Center for 
 Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA in 2012.
 JNfile: 13-bolker-strategies.pdf}
}

in the .bib file, I get two warnings with your MWE (running under biblatex 3.7/Biber 2.7)

WARN - month field 'June' in entry 'quietpenguin' is not an integer - this will probably not sort properly.
WARN - The entry 'bolkernonlin13' has characters which cannot be encoded in 'ascii'. Recoding problematic characters into macros.

Depending on how your encoding is set up you may not get the second warning.

The first warning you should do something about, instead of

year = {2013},
month = {June},

use

date = {2013-06},

or month = {6}, if you must stick to month and year (note that there is no such thing as a day field!).

In particular there are no warnings about junk characters. Sometimes they can be ignored, but sometimes they warn you about a problem in your file.

The warning will look like (not from your example!)

WARN - BibTeX subsystem: C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Temp\vdumzDAIKo\junchhars.bib_7000.utf8, line 2, warning: 22 characters of junk seen at toplevel

just check at and around the indicated line (in this case line 2) for anything unusual.

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