Make one author's name bold every time it shows up in the bibliography (continued)

Question

The solution provided here

Make one author's name bold every time it shows up in the bibliography

does unfortunately not work, as soon as the Author's name contains special characters, e.g. Hans M{\"u}ller? How can this problem be solved?

Answer 1

The following modification of this answer seems to work if you use the plain bib style:

\let\originalbibitem\bibitem
\def\bibitem#1#2\par{%
  \noexpandarg
  \originalbibitem{#1}
  \StrSubstitute{#2}{Hans M{\"u}ller}{\textbf{Hans M{\"u}ller}}\par}

Example

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{a,
author={M{\"u}ller, Gerd},
title={Scoring goals},
journal={J. Applied Soccer},
year={1974},
}
@article{b,
author={M{\"u}ller, Hans},
title={Splitting hairs},
journal={J. Abstract Tetrapiloctomy},
year={1255},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{xstring}

\let\originalbibitem\bibitem
\def\bibitem#1#2\par{%
  \noexpandarg
  \originalbibitem{#1}
  \StrSubstitute{#2}{Hans M{\"u}ller}{\textbf{Hans M{\"u}ller}}\par}

\begin{document}
\cite{a}

\cite{b}

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

Answer 2

I finally found a straightforward solution by modifying the .bbl-file with sed:

bibtex mydoc

mv my.bbl my.bbl.ori 

cat my.bbl.ori | tr '\n' '\t' | sed 's/\(M{\\\"u}ller, *\t* *H.\)/\\textbf{\1}/g'  | tr '\t' '\n' > my.bbl

The trick is to convert newlines to tabs in order to enable sed to wrap the name into \texbf{...}, even if there is a newline in between.