What's the correct way to comment out sections of explanatory text (included for humans to read) in a .bib file? I would like biber/biblatex to simply ignore this text.
When I put in text like
####################################################################### ## PREPRINTS I get warnings like
WARN - BibTeX subsystem: /tmp/8XsEEmjVOo/bib-latest.bib_14175.utf8, line 7, warning: 139 characters of junk seen at toplevel Anything that is not inside a recognized entry is a comment. So just type along! Any .bib interpreter that complains about it is buggy, as it is not following the rules laid down in btxdoc. However, you can use an entry like @COMMENT, which will hopefully not trigger any complains.
%, whereas BibTeX does not? % and it spews warnings all the time. I know I can ignore them, but it is a pain as they clutter the output. At least with biber, you should be able to use the same commenting method as with LaTeX, that is using % for the commented line.
After a few test comments can be outside entries, within entries (commenting a whole line) or commenting the end of a line.
%%%%%%%%%%% % PREPRINT @article{myarticle, author = {Onymous, A. N.}, %The author % the title of the article title = {A Nice title}, } Should work as expected. However this may not be the case with bibtex.
bibtex". Indeed, this does not seem to work with bibtex. I have an entry in my .bib file with a line like author = {Onymous, A. N.}, %The author in it. In TeXShop, when I hit the Typeset button with BibTex selected in the drop down next to it, I get a message in the console saying "You're missing a field name" and "I'm skipping whatever remains of this entry". The rest of my entry was indeed ignored and I got an incomplete reference in my .pdf. bibtex, I realise my comment is probably not so useful. I'm quite a novice at these things, do you think mine is a case of a buggy .bib interpreter, as the other answer suggests? Thanks for your reply. I had difficulties commenting out entries in a .bib file (as opposed to adding free-standing comments). Posts to date on this thread did not address this particular problem.
I'm using Overleaf). What I observed:
bibtex looks for entries (@blah) before it checks if the line starts with a % (or so I figured).title=, etc) is ignored and you end up with errors ('missing field') attributable to @blahSheesh.
This doesn't work:
%@article{foo2019, % ... % } This works (replace the @):
%%article{foo2019, % ... % } I poked around in Overleaf and found this explanation (note that mine, above, is a bit different):
% is actually not a comment character in .bib files! So, inserting a % in .bib files not only fails to comment out the line, it also causes some BibTEX errors. To get BibTEX to ignore a particular field we just need to rename the field to something that BibTEX doesn’t recognise. For example, if you want to keep a date field around but prefer that it’s ignored (perhaps because you want BibTEX to use the year field instead) write Tdate = {...} or the more human-readable IGNOREdate = {...}.
To get BibTEX to ignore an entire entry you can remove the @ before the entry type. A valid reference entry always starts with a @ followed by the entry type; without the @ character BibTEX skips the lines until it encounters another @.
bibtex is very focused on @; biber apparently respects %s (but you'd have to use biblatex). See pointers provided by moewe (in the comments) for other discussion.
btparse) and BibTeX. See for example tex.stackexchange.com/q/261261/35864, tex.stackexchange.com/q/325696/35864.