We're using a bibtex file in XeLaTeX + biblatex that was originally encoded in ASCII, so accented characters are represented by macros. The rest of the text is Unicode UTF-8. One of the accented characters in the .bib file is \"{0}
, which XeLaTeX deals with just fine (and this is the way of representing such characters I see in places like https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Special_Characters#Escaped_codes. But biber complains:
ERROR - BibTeX subsystem: /tmp/i_hu76qDT8/References.bib_3533.utf8,
line 2, syntax error: found "{o}", expected end of entry ("}" or ")")
(skipping to next "@")
INFO - ERRORS: 1
Biber apparently wants the format {\"o}
, which XeLaTeX also accepts.
We normally use UTF-8 everywhere, rather than ASCII escaped characters. But when importing old .bib files, we haven't been bothering to convert the escaped character codes to UTF-8--at least until now. In fact I know this worked without our converting the codes for several years; it must be a recent change to biber that broke the \"{o} representation. (We now have biber v2.10.)
Is this expected, or a bug? Minimal example follows. It "compiles" ok in XeLaTeX, but the biber step fails with the above error msg.
===========XeLaTeX file==========
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{References.bib}
\begin{document}
John S\"{o}ren wrote \cite{TestEntry}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
==========.bib file============
@InCollection{TestEntry,
author = "John S\"{o}ren",
booktitle = "Nonesuch",
publisher = "Some Publisher",
address = "Somewhere",
year = "1996"
}