Possible incompatibility between babel, listings and biblatex causes problem with unbreakable space in bibliography

Question

The following example compiles with an error:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[english]{babel}\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage{listings}%\usepackage{listingsutf8}

\usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{bib.bib}
    @Article{A1, title = {A b}}
    @Article{A2, title = {A~b}}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{bib.bib}

\begin{document}

    A: \cite{A1}.\\
    B: \cite{A2}.\\

    \printbibliography

\end{document}

l.23 Undefined control sequence.

Something probably causes the ~ character in bibliography entry to be confusing for LaTeX, as document with \cite{A2} commented out compiles with no errors.

Either changing \usepackage[english]{babel} to \usepackage{babel}
or changing \usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex} to \usepackage{biblatex},
or removing \usepackage{listings} (which is necessary, but its application was removed from the MWE),
also causes the document to compile without errors, so there are four factors involved: all three of these packages together with the usage of tilde character in bibliography.

I cannot figure out the reason because this incompatibility, but resolving it would be quite useful for me.

Answer 1

Edit:

Recently (September 2019) listings was updated and this issue no longer exists.

---

As Ulrike Fischer said in the comments below, this is a bug in listings. The package uses \lccode to define types of character for later use. This \lccode trick uses ~ because it's the one standard active character in LaTeX. But listings "forgets" to reset this \lccode to the original value and then \the\lccode`~ remains equal to 122 (that of z).

To fix the problem you can reset the \lccode of ~ right after listings is loaded. Also, as egreg found out here, the same issue happens with \/, so the same fix can be used for both:

\usepackage{listings}
\lccode`~=0 % Fix for ~
\lccode`\/=0 % Fix for \/ (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/202621/134574)

---

Old answer:

The problem is actually unrelated to biblatex. The same error is raised by the following MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{listings}
\begin{document}
\MakeLowercase{A~b}
\end{document}

and the error is:

! Undefined control sequence.
<to be read again> az
                     b
l.12 \MakeLowercase{A~b}

This happens with biblatex because it uses \MakeLowercase.

The error is, I think, due to some incompatibility caused by the interaction of babel and listings.

Apparently the \lccode of ~ is defined to z and this z is undefined. A workaround (not sure if the best alternative) is to make this definition:

\begingroup\lccode`~=`z\lowercase{\endgroup\let~= }

then your MWE works fine:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[english]{babel}\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage{listings}%\usepackage{listingsutf8}

\usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{bib.bib}
    @Article{A1, title = {A b}}
    @Article{A2, title = {A~b}}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{bib.bib}

\begingroup\lccode`~=`z\lowercase{\endgroup\let~= }

\begin{document}

    A: \cite{A1}.\\
    B: \cite{A2}.\\

    \printbibliography

\end{document}