Issue with autozotbib: some url are saved with "%" symbol which breaks bibliography compilation

Delosari · September 2, 2015

Hello

For a few years I have been using autozotbib to generate my .bib files and so far I had been very happy with it

However, since my zotero installation, I am unable to compile my library as some url references include a "%" symbol. Here there is an example:

url = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989A%26AS...80..317O},

If such a reference is included in a manuscript, I will not be able to compile it...

I am using the standard installation of zotero and autozotbib with the translator "BibTeX_RobinTan.js"

Would anyone share any work around this issue or an alternative plugin to generate the .bib library?

Thanks in advance

adamsmith · September 2, 2015

See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22611/bibtex-percent-symbols-in-urls-and-curly-braces/ for details. The problem would seem to be the .bst style you're using. It seems like a very bad idea to require URLs to be escaped in any way.

Delosari · September 4, 2015

Thank you very much for your reply

I am using the bst style from the publication website so I cannot change that ....

However, I do not understand why it compiles once I have manually remove the % from the url entry...

Should not it be an issue from the translator, rather than with the bst? Is there a plugin in zotero to for example... delete all the entries which have this issue? I know it is not a real solution but...

adamsmith · September 4, 2015

well done .bst styles treat URLs as literal strings, so they wouldn't fail on compile. When they don't, any bibtex special character in a URL like % or # breaks the compilation.

You could likely just fix that with a text editor on the file output by autozotbib. Otherwise you'd have to go into the translator and modify that -- it's pretty straightforward javascript, so that wouldn't be terribly hard, either.