Calibre does not create a valid .bib file

[Xwang]

When I create a .bib catalog, it is not valid if comments are added.
I presume that the problem is given by charcters/sequences of characters in the comments that are "reserved" in bibtex format.
Maybe the comment data should be cleaned/trasformed in plain test before writing the .bib file.

[sengian (sengian)]

The data of the comments is already passed through html2text.
When you say "it is not valid if comments are added.", what do you mean?
Which program do you use?
Please join a catalog and a debug report showing your problem.

[Xwang (xwang1976)]

I use jabref.
I've foud that the problem was with a comment which contained a {.
Once I've removed such a characters, the problem has disappeared.
Moreover the presence of " in the comments creates a catalogue which is not correctly understood both from jabref and kbibtex as far as the comment are concerned even if the catalogue in such a case is understood (all the books are loaded even if the comments are lost).
The " is easily found because in the bi file is stored as a {"} so I can change it via a text editor.
The other one has been more difficult to find.
I've recreated the issue with a 2 books catalogue which is not readable by jabref which reports EOF in mid string in line 52.

[AlexB (halexjb)]

html2text would not help this problem as far as I know, as it does not escape curly braces and quotations, which are special marks in bibtex.

I escaped the curly braces with a backslash, but it didn't work, at least using jabref. So maybe jabref isn't escaping properly either. The answer would be to either strip the curly braces, or escape curly braces that don't match, i.e. { or } separately, but not {}. Then the escaping issue would have to be picked up by jabref.

The problem is similar to this:
https://github.com/zotero/translators/pull/504

[AlexB (halexjb)]

See also: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/26847/

[AlexB (halexjb)]

My pull request solution strips out orphan curly braces, while leaving matching curly braces in place. Users should use \leftbrace or \rightbrace in markup instead, as per this advice: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/109066

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/125

[sengian (sengian)]

Thanks for the fix.
Frankly one my main problem with BibTex is that I didn't find any real complete reference/standard.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

@sengian: If you are ok with the fix, then please send me a pull request that I can merge. Apparently Alex closed his pull request.

[AlexB (halexjb)]

Reopened https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/126.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every Friday.

 status fixreleased