biblatex error in parsing title with math

Question

I'm seeing odd behavior from biblatex that has to do with parsing a title with mathematics in it. Here is an MWE.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber,bibstyle=numeric,firstinits=true]{biblatex}    
\addbibresource{mwe.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{DeDeVa00a}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Here is the mwe.bib:

@Article{DeDeVa00a,
  author    = {Lieven {De Lathauwer} and Bart {De Moor} and Joos Vandewalle},
  doi       = {10.1137/S0895479898346995},
  journal   = {SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications},
  number    = {4},
  title     = {On the Best Rank-1 and Rank-{$(R_1, R_2, \dots, R_N)$} Approximation of     Higher-order Tensors},
  volume    = {21},
  year      = {2000},
  pages     = {1324-1342},
}

In the bbl file, the title has added extra $'s before and after \dots.

     \field{title}{On the Best Rank-1 and Rank-{$(R_1, R_2, {$\dots$}, R_N)$} Approximation of Higher-order Tensors}

My current workaround is to edit the bbl file after biber runs, but this is obviously not ideal. I got an idea about the error from this post: Extra } or forgotten $ with biblatex and biber. However, the fixes there are not working in this case.

This looks like a Biber bug, reported at https://github.com/plk/biber/issues/225 — moewe, May 16 '18 at 21:44

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '18 at 11:58

I'd say this is a Biber bug and have reported this at https://github.com/plk/biber/issues/225.

The problem is that \dots is converted to … by Biber. And then … is converted back to {$\dots$}. Naturally {$\dots$} breaks if its is inserted for \dots in {$(R_1, R_2, \dots, R_N)$}.

You can work around this substitution by defining a command that is not translated to Unicode by Biber.

\newcommand*{\mywadots}{\dots}

and then

@article{DeDeVa00a,
  author    = {Lieven De Lathauwer and Bart De Moor and Joos Vandewalle},
  doi       = {10.1137/S0895479898346995},
  journal   = {SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications},
  number    = {4},
  title     = {On the Best Rank-1 and Rank-{$(R_1, R_2, \mywadots, R_N)$} Approximation of Higher-order Tensors},
  volume    = {21},
  year      = {2000},
  pages     = {1324-1342},
}

People who use a Unicode engine or a LaTeX release where UTF-8 is the default encoding can not reproduce the error, since Biber does not recode … back to {$\dots$} in these cases,

\field{title}{On the Best Rank-1 and Rank-{$(R_1, R_2, …, R_N)$} Approximation of Higher-order Tensors}

ends up in the .bbl instead.

Thanks for letting me know this is a bug. I appreciate the workaround though I haven't implemented it because then it breaks other things since this is coming from a shared bib file that is also used for other projects. — tgkolda, May 25 '18 at 16:14

biblatex error in parsing title with math

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