Why is the BST hack for highlighting author name not working?

Question

Following this (which is a compact form of this), I created this MWE.

demo.tex

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran2}
\bibliography{pub}

\end{document}

pub.bib

@article{janssen1996evaluation,
    title={Evaluation of the DNA fingerprinting method AFLP as a new tool in bacterial taxonomy},
    author={Janssen, Paul and Coopman, Renata and Huys, Geert and Swings, Jean and Bleeker, Marjo and Vos, Pieter and Zabeau, Marc and Kersters, Karel},
    journal={Microbiology},
    volume={142},
    number={7},
    pages={1881--1893},
    year={1996},
    publisher={Soc General Microbiol}
}

@article{vos1995aflp,
    title={AFLP: a new technique for DNA fingerprinting},
    author={Vos, Pieter and Hogers, Rene and Bleeker, Marjo and Reijans, Martin and Van de Lee, Theo and Hornes, Miranda and Friters, Adrie and Pot, Jerina and Paleman, Johan and Kuiper, Martin and others},
    journal={Nucleic acids research},
    volume={23},
    number={21},
    pages={4407--4414},
    year={1995},
    publisher={Oxford Univ Press}
}

Relevant change in IEEEtran2.bst (clone of original IEEEtran.bst)

FUNCTION {highlight.if.cv.author}
{ duplicate$ purify$ "Janssen, Paul" purify$ =
    { bold }
    'skip$
  if$
}

FUNCTION {format.names}
{ 'bibinfo :=
  duplicate$ empty$ 'skip$ {
  this.to.prev.status
  this.status.std
  's :=
  "" 't :=
  #1 'nameptr :=
  s num.names$ 'numnames :=
  numnames 'namesleft :=
    { namesleft #0 > }
    { s nameptr
      name.format.string
      format.name$
      highlight.if.cv.author
      bibinfo bibinfo.check
      't :=
.
.
.

Still the name of Paul Janssen is not highlighted in the generated bibliography. What am I missing?

Answer 1

The highlight function is comparing an actual string, so it needs to use "P. Janssen" as the literal for comparison. Also there is no bold function defined in IEEEtrans.bst. So your highlight function needs to be:

FUNCTION {highlight.if.cv.author}
{ duplicate$ purify$ "P. Janssen" purify$ =
    { "\textbf{" swap$ * "}" * }
    'skip$
  if$
}