biblatex: no pages for article

Question

I have to cite articles without page numbers, book sections however are supposed to have them. I'm using the following code to avoid the "pp." before the pages:

\DefineBibliographyStrings{ngerman}{pages={}}

Obviously, this omits page numbers for all citations. Is there a way to have only the articles without page numbers?

Answer 1

You have to change the format of the pages field which deals with page ranges of articles, incollections etc. in the bibliography. (There's also a pagetotal field for the total pages of, e.g., books.) The optional argument of \DeclareFieldFormat takes a comma-separated list of entry types for which the new/changed format should apply.

Changing the format for in-text-citations requires to fiddle with the postnote field; see section 3.11.3 of the biblatex manual for details.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{pages}{#1}%

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Bli74,
  author = {Blinder, Alan S.},
  year = {1974},
  title = {The economics of brushing teeth},
  journaltitle = {Journal of Political Economy},
  volume = {82},
  number = {4},
  pages = {887--891},
}
@incollection{Fis00,
  author = {Fischel, William A.},
  year = {2000},
  title = {Zoning and land use regulation},
  maintitle = {Encyclopedia of law and economics},
  volume = {2},
  booktitle = {Civil law and economics},
  editor = {Boudewijn, Bouckaert and de Geest, Gerrit},
  location = {Cheltenham},
  publisher = {Elgar},
  pages = {403--442},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

Some text \autocites[887]{Bli74}[403]{Fis00}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

EDIT: iennisei's answer makes me think I may have misunderstood your question: In case you don't only want to drop the prefix for article page ranges, but to omit them entirely, use the following code (which makes the above format redefinition superfluous):

\AtEveryBibitem{%
  \ifentrytype{article}{%
    \clearfield{pages}%
  }{%
  }%
}

Answer 2

The technique you used replaces the language string for "pages" throughout the entire bibliography, and also presupposes that you do not write any page references in the entries for your articles (but what if you need them for another paper, with another citation style?). @lockstep's answer is more targeted, but (unless I am mistaken) also supposes that you omit the page numbers in your .bib file.

In order to prevent printing the page number altogether, how about this:

\renewbibmacro*{note+pages}{%
    \printfield{note}%
    %\setunit{\bibpagespunct}%
    %\printfield{pages}%
    \newunit}

The note+pages macro is used by the standard.bbx file for displaying the page numbers of articles. It is the file called by authoryear for formatting the bibliography.