Biber failed to identify author name with "-"

Question

When the author name with "-", biber tends to generate dummy characters around the name. For example, one input in bib file as the following.

@article{Baker,
author = {Baker, F.B. and Al‐Karni, A},
journal = {Journal of Educational Measurement},
pages = {147--162},
title = {{A comparison of two procedures for computing IRT equating coefficients}},
url = {http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1991.tb00350.x/abstract},
volume = {28},
year = {1991}
}

when the above input compiled in latex, error message will be generated and if check back to the bbl file, the "-" became fffd...

\name{labelname}{2}{}{%
        {{uniquename=0,hash=4d61c716006737e01dad3e296d8cb4b2}{Baker}
{B\bibinitperiod}{F.B.}{F\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
        {{uniquename=0,hash=bbeb8c73c9f3f7bd033ecb2e8bbdab2d}
{Al\x{fffd}\x{fffd}\x{fffd}Karni}{A\bibinitperiod}{A}{A\bibinitperiod}{}{}{}{}}%
      }

and the output of pdflatex will be

Baker, F. & AlfffdfffdfffdKarni, A. (1991). A comparison of two procedures for computing IRT equating coefficients. Journal of Educational Measurement, 28, 147–162.

rather than the original one as

Baker, F. & Al-Karni, A. (1991). A comparison of two procedures for computing IRT equating coefficients. Journal of Educational Measurement, 28, 147–162.

Is it a bug of biber or biblatex? And how to fix it?

Try to replace the dash by a normal dash: -. The dash in your file might be some weird unicode character that looks like a dash but isn't the normal one. (In fact, if you copy the character in Al‐Karni from your MWE and search for it on this page, you will only find that occurrence of the character; all the other dashes are different characters.) — moewe, Apr 01 '14 at 11:53
(The strange character is not that weird, it's a unicode HYPHEN. So totally the right kind of dash, except that with TeX you use normal ASCII "-".) — pst, Apr 01 '14 at 12:03
The reference was generated from Scopus and managed by Mendeley. — xukun, Apr 01 '14 at 12:04
question about a similar problem: LuaTeX won't end a line at Unicode emdash — barbara beeton, Apr 01 '14 at 12:41
xelatex or lualatex and biber have no problem with this. However, you just found a gap in biber's UTF-8 <-> TeX macro recoding table so I'll fix this in 1.9. Then you can just call biblatex with the "safeinputenc" option and it should work. — PLK, Apr 01 '14 at 20:32

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 01 '14 at 12:04

You can either change the character in the bib file with a simple hyphen.

Here's a different strategy that might be better with automatically generated bib entries.

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Baker,
author = {Baker, F. B. and Al‐Karni, A.},
journal = {Journal of Educational Measurement},
pages = {147--162},
title = {{A comparison of two procedures for computing IRT equating coefficients}},
url = {http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1991.tb00350.x/abstract},
volume = {28},
year = {1991}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % avoid strange translations by Biber
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{biblatex}

\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{‐}{-} % the first is what's in Al‐Karni, the second is a normal hyphen

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{Baker}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

The filecontents* environment is just to have a self-contained example, use your own bib file.

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Biber failed to identify author name with "-"

1 Answers1