Escaping and brace nesting in bibtex field values

[Omikhleia]

Extracted from review comment #2048 (comment)

BibTeX allows two types syntax for (leaf-)string values in field:

• Braced {My Awesome Book}
• Quoted "My Awesome Book"

Out bibtex implementation currently supports both on the surface, but things get much trickier inside these strings:

• There can be nested braced content with a specific/mixed meaning (making TeX commands "robust", enforcing by-passing casing rules, or even used as a separator... Ex:
  • {{\relax Ph}ilip Doe}, {{\LaTeX}} etc. = some TeX-based mess
  • {Doe, John and {National Aeronautics and Space Administration}} = avoid the organization being seen and parsed as a name (split at and)
  • (In addition to name fields, in BibLaTeX) special handing of multiple institution, publisher, location fields, ex. {Johnson {and} Smith} vs London and Paris
  • {My {A}we{S}ome Book} when lower-cased, title-cased, or whatever, would keep A and S capitals...
• In the quoted variant, we currently make the assumption that backslash-escaping quotes should work, e.g. "My \"Awesome\" Book", but the official way documented in "Tame the BeaST. The B to X of BibTEX,* version 1.4 (2009) seems to be "My {"}Awesome{"} Book"

--> For full correct support, we may need to revise our grammar at some point (and or consolidate some entries differently).

[alerque]

Have you run across ABNF, EBNF, or any other formal grammars for BibTeX stuff or are there just a hodge–podge of implementations we're copying that might not even all match each other? Any links to grammars or parsers in any language would probably be useful when we go to address this.

[alerque]

From the soon to be closed PR, a still relevant comment:

For some elements (e.g. @string), I checked a few (non-grammar-based) implementations as well as a few ABNF grammars. But the rest is mostly from the biblatex manual and Tame the Beast. Problem is that most ABNF specifications I've found are incomplete... So yes, it ends up as a bit of a hodge-podge... (Hence also the "notes" on the format added in the documentation, as it's not clear to me that there's some full complete definition agreed by everyone and formally defined... Biber/biblatex keep adding stuff!)