[OS X TeX] BibDesk produces invalid bib file

[Paulo Ferreira]

On 2011/04/12, at 09:37, Jan Hegewald wrote:

> Hi all,
> I am a happy user of BibDesk. Sometimes it can not open the previously saved .bib files, i.e. it shows a dialog with "Unable to parse string as BibTeX ...". I use only BibDesk to edit my bin files. I guess this has to do with the keys I use. For online references, I like to use the full URL as key, e.g. http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/. Some URLs contain characters liek = or ? and my guess is that BibDesk is choking on those.

Yes. 
The range of supported chars on a key is limited. 

> I usually do not close my bib file for several weeks, so when this error occurs, there are often lots of new entries, which makes it harder to track all the "erroneous" ones.

You can use the Menu  "Window"->"Errors" to check for wrong keys. 

> Can you see if you can reproduce this error, so I can file a bug report.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> -- Jan


It's not a bug. It is a feature!  
:-) :-) 

Greetings 

Paulo Ferreira