[Tex/LaTex] dealing with strange characters in a bib file

biberbiblatexbibtexunicode

I use mendeley to generate my bib file so I have a very large list of items (3000+) and since mendeley collects the bibliography information sometimes from the pdf file, there may be errors and strange characters. I guess this is why I get the following error

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:∗ not set up for use with LaTeX.

What should I do? I use Pdftexify on WinEdt8. packages are up to date

\documentclass[11pt,captions=nooneline]{scrartcl}
    \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}% For proper input encoding
    \usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}
    \usepackage[citestyle=authoryear,isbn=false,maxcitenames=3,maxbibnames=99,doi=false,url=true]{biblatex} % place in the document preamble
    \addbibresource{D:/Gdrive/Drop/Dropbox/STATADO/paper/latex/p2/library.bib}

example of a bib item gone wrong:

@article{Biais2009,
author = {Biais, Bruno and Weill, Pierre-olivier},
file = {:D$\backslash$:/Gdrive/Drop/Dropbox/mendeley/Biais, Weill - 2009 - Liquidity shocks and order book dynamics ∗ - Unknown.pdf:pdf},
keywords = {bid-ask spread,limit-order book,liquidity,search},
pages = {1--51},
title = {{Liquidity shocks and order book dynamics ∗}},
year = {2009}
}

here I guess the * is bad…

Best Answer

first, let me thank @karlkoeller @jon @Ulrike Fischer @darthbith and @Bart Arondson for their help.

What I did :

1) export a small bib file containing all the citations I need. nothing more 2) correct manually the mistakes generated by mendeley 3) contemplate a well compiled pdf

thank you all, I hope this can help other mendeley users

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citing (author, journalabbr., year) needed

First thing to do is to add a field for the journal abbreviation to the article entrytype, journalabbr in the MWE. Therefore you need to declare a datamodel (an extra file; in the MWE I've used filecontents to simulate that) and you have to tell biblatex/biber to use it in the package options.

Then you have to modify the cite command, so it fits your needs. \citep from the authoryear-style (your citestyle) uses the \cite command. There you just have to add a switch, which checks if the field journalabbr is empty or not, and prints it out or not.

Last but not least you have to add the abbreviation fields to the entries.

MWE:

\begin{filecontents}{min.bib}
@article{boisson2003unexpected,
  title={Unexpected protein families including cell defense components feature in the N-myristoylome of a higher eukaryote},
  author={Boisson, B. and Giglione, Carmela and Meinnel, Thierry},
  journal={Journal of Biological Chemistry},
  journalabbr={JBC},
  year={2003},
  publisher={ASBMB}
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{authorjabbryear.dbx}
\ProvidesFile{authorjabbryear.dbx}
\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field,datatype=literal]{journalabbr}
\DeclareDatamodelEntryfields[article]{journalabbr}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[fontsize=11pt, paper=a4, ngerman, DIV=calc]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[scaled]{helvet}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[german=quotes]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-comp,sortcites=true,sorting=nyt,isbn=false,natbib=true, citestyle=authoryear,bibstyle=authoryear,backend=biber,maxnames=1,maxcitenames=1,
,datamodel=authorjabbryear%added!
] {biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{ngerman}{ andothers = {{et\,al\adddot}} }

\renewbibmacro*{cite}{%from authoryear.cbx
  \iffieldundef{shorthand}
    {\ifthenelse{\ifnameundef{labelname}\OR\iffieldundef{labelyear}}
       {\usebibmacro{cite:label}%
        \setunit{\addspace}}
       {\printnames{labelname}%
        \setunit{\nameyeardelim}}%
     \iffieldundef{journalabbr}{}{%
        \printfield{journalabbr}%
        \setunit{\nameyeardelim}%
        }%
     \usebibmacro{cite:labelyear+extrayear}}
    {\usebibmacro{cite:shorthand}}}

\addbibresource{min.bib}

\begin{document}

\citep{boisson2003unexpected} 

How it should look like: 

(Boisson et al., JBC, 2003)

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Biblatex Biber – How to Fix Junk Characters in .bib File

If you copy-and-paste your code into a Unicode converter such that https://w3c.github.io/xml-entities/unicode-names.html you will find that you have an invisible

U+feff ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

in the line after the comment. Since that invisible character is not hidden from Biber with a comment character, it produces this harmless warning. (Like BibTeX Biber ignores text outside of entries. But unlike BibTeX Biber warns about possible junk characters unless the text outside of entries is marked as a comment with %. BibTeX does not recognise % as a comment character. See code comments in a biblatex file, Are comments discouraged in a BibTeX file?, Comment out sections of text in bib file.)

You can always choose to ignore Biber's "junk character" warnings, they are just a sign that something might be wrong in your .bib, like a missing or spurious brace or comma. But it need not mean anything bad. Usually you'll get a hard error if something is really wrong.

The trick is to remove the invisible character

% Encoding: UTF-8

@article{aguzzi2013microglia,
  title   = {Microglia: scapegoat, saboteur, or something else?},
  author  = {Aguzzi, Adriano and Barres, Ben A. and Bennett, Mariko L.},
  journal = {Science},
  volume  = {339},
  number  = {6116},
  pages   = {156--161},
  year    = {2013},
}

Biber will not complain about the comment per se.

Note that it is usually better to end given name initials with a dot instead of just giving the letter.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citing (author, journalabbr., year) needed

Biblatex Biber – How to Fix Junk Characters in .bib File

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