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EDIT Downgrading biber and updating it again (with tex Live) solved it:

➜  latex tlmgr restore biber
Available backups for biber: 50203 (2020-02-05 09:07)
➜  latex tlmgr restore biber 50203
Do you really want to restore biber to revision 50203 (y/N): y
Restoring biber, 50203 from /usr/local/texlive/2019/tlpkg/backups/biber.r50203.tar.xz
running mktexlsr ...
done running mktexlsr.
running mtxrun --generate ...
done running mtxrun --generate.
tlmgr: package log updated: /usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-var/web2c/tlmgr.log
➜  biber -v
biber version: 2.14

Run Tex Live and update biber, should work now

I tried to compile my work that used to work a few days ago, and Biber 2.14 cannot parse any dates from my bib file any more. I have pages and pages of the following errors (and no reference is added to the output).

This used to compile without any errors before (the '...' is just to remove the noise).

Errors with the latest biber (before restoring using the above commands):

Biber warning: [558] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-05-17' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [563] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2013' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [563] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018-12-15' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [573] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2008' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [583] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2014' of date field 'date' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [584] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-05-19' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [588] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2017' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [589] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018-12-27' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [591] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '1997' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [592] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-05-18' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [602] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-06-01' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [603] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2020-02-16' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [608] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2005' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [611] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2016' of date field 'date' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [611] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2020-02-26' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [618] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018' of date field 'date' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [618] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018-12-15' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [623] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2016' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [624] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-05-10' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [629] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2004' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [629] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018-12-15' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [634] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '1999' of date field 'date' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [635] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-07-09' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring 
Biber warning: [637] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2006' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [637] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-07-07' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [648] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2017' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [648] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2018-12-27' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [656] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019' of date field 'date' - ignoring
Biber warning: [657] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2019-07-02' of date field 'urldate' - ignoring
Biber warning: [662] Utils.pm:304> WARN - Entry '...' (x.bib): Invalid format '2015' of date field 'date' - ignoring

EDIT, a sample that would be rejected:

x.bib

@article{parisAntisocialBorderlinePersonality1997,
  title = {Antisocial and Borderline Personality Disorders: {{Two}} Separate Diagnoses or Two Aspects of the Same Psychopathology?},
  shorttitle = {Antisocial and Borderline Personality Disorders},
  author = {Paris, Joel},
  date = {1997},
  journaltitle = {Comprehensive Psychiatry},
  shortjournal = {Comprehensive Psychiatry},
  volume = {38},
  pages = {237--242},
  issn = {0010440X},
  doi = {10.1016/S0010-440X(97)90032-8},
  url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010440X97900328},
  urldate = {2019-05-18},
  langid = {english},
  number = {4}
}

sample.tex

\documentclass[a4paper,man,floatsintext,12pt]{apa6}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa,sortcites=true,sorting=nyt,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage[colorlinks,allcolors=blue]{hyperref}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{pdflscape}
\usepackage{color,soul}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning}
\usepackage{lastpage}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}
\addbibresource{x.bib}
\authornote{x}
\title{x}
\shorttitle{x}
\author{x}
\affiliation{x}
\abstract{
x
}
\keywords{x}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\parencite{parisAntisocialBorderlinePersonality1997}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Command

latexmk -pdf -xelatex
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7
  • 2
    Can you please share an entry of x.bib with us and a short example document that cites such an entry? I can not reproduce the warnings you are getting.
    – moewe
    Mar 31, 2020 at 4:50
  • 1
    Is a year a valid date? I have no issues with it using TL19 frozen, using pdflatex as I don't have that font. BTW: latexmk -pdf -xelatex does not make sense, you are asking for both pdflatex and xelatex drop the -pdf as PDF output is the default for xelatex anyway
    – daleif
    Mar 31, 2020 at 11:47
  • Mhhh, the entry works absolutely fine for me in a small example document using a standard style as well as in your larger document using apa style. Can you please test the MWEs from gist.github.com/moewew/f54f200adb65399edb6cdad8a7ca2077 (the MWEs are compilable without any changes, so please do not modify them before you run them)? Please upload the full .blg file of the failing runs to your question. (The .blg file isn't long and should easily fit into the question. .blg files can be opened with any text editor.)
    – moewe
    Mar 31, 2020 at 14:29
  • @moewe thanks heaps for setting it up, I re-updated biber (with nothing but fear) and all my documents are still compiling just fine. I'm not sure what caused it, the only suspicion I have is that other libraries put something in place that prevented biber from working? I'm really not sure. I'll leave the answer here (rollback-reupdate), just in case someone faces this again. Thanks again!
    – Adam
    Mar 31, 2020 at 22:10
  • Mhh, since Biber comes bundled with all its dependencies and libraries I'd expect it is unlikely that some other piece of software would cause this issue. (It would have been interesting to see the full .blg file, ideally it would have contained a few more lines that could give a hint as to what was going wrong.) Since Biber comes bundled with all its dependencies, it needs to be unpacked on first run. If this unpacking step goes wrong for some reason, weird errors can occur. ...
    – moewe
    Apr 1, 2020 at 5:03

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

As above, rolling it back from the command line (latex tlmgr restore biber) then updating it again to the latest version solved the problem. I'm not sure what caused it (maybe the order of the install with other packages...?)

Further edit, the Biber cache got corrupted, so the steps that can solve this are:

Clean the build

latexmk -c

And clear the biber cache

rm -rf `biber --cache`

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