[Tex/LaTex] bibtex – Change format of urldate

biblatexbibtexdatetimeformatting

I have the problem that I use the citation manager Citavi and it can only export in the format urldate = {dd.mm.yyyy}. However Bibtex needs the format urldate = {yyyy-mm-dd}. It is not really realistic in my case to change all the dates of my bibliography manually, as I have many entries and after each export I would need to redo it.

For example my bibtex entry looks like this:

@Misc{FAO.2011,
  Title                    = {{FAOSTAT: Food balance sheet}},
  Author                   = {FAO},
  Year                     = {2011},
  Address                  = {Rome},
  Url                      = {http://faostat3.fao.org/download/FB/FBS/E},
  Urldate                  = {15.1.2014}
}

Then I receive following warning, when I compile it with BibTex

Package biblatex Warning: Biber reported the following issues
(biblatex) with 'FAO.2011':
(biblatex) - Datamodel: Entry 'FAO.2011' (literature.bib): Inval
id format '15.1.2014' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring.

Is there any way to change the format of Bibtex that it reads the urldate in format urldate = {dd.mm.yyyy} or can I convert it somehow to urldate = {yyyy-mm-dd}?

I have searched in the internet and haven't found any solution for this problem. It seems to be a specific problem of Citavi. To bad that Citavi is not customizable.

My question is similar to this: Ignore a bibliography field [e.g. "urldate"] for eliminating of biblatex/biber warnings. However, no solution was provided in this topic for my problem, because in this case urldate was not needed and thus just ignored. But I need to give urldate.

Best Answer

Thanks to Giacomo's feedback, I found another solution for this specific problem:

The problem is somehow more related to Citavi and Citavi is not as clear or transparent as LaTeX. For future reference of other people who might encounter a similar problem: Although Citavi asks to provide the date in the format urldate={dd.mm.yyyy} you can type it in as urldate = {yyyy-mm-dd}. The export does not make any problem. Strangly, by just changing one entry, all the other entries are exported accordingly. My fault not trying it out earlier. I should have tried it out earlier.

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