Re: [org-cite] citekey restrictions?

[Joost Kremers]

On Sun, May 16 2021, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> However, allowing anything means some keys will not be compatible with
> some bibliography formats. For example, I doubt BibTeX would appreciate
> a percent character in a key.

Careful, trying to find out the details of BibTeX's file format is a quest that
I think no-one has ever returned from. :D I have a comment in =parsebib.el=
saying that BibTeX allows $ ^ and & in entry keys, despite the fact that those
characters are special in TeX...

The regexp =parsebib.el= uses for entry keys is this:

    "[^\"@\\#%',={} \t\n\f]+"

Mind you, I have no idea if BibTeX really rejects all these characters (well,
I'm pretty sure about the white space... :D ), but even if they are acceptable,
they probably don't occur much in the wild. At least I'm not aware of any user
complaints since the time I added support for $^&, which was four years ago,

> So... let's get liberal and say a key must match:
>
>   (rx "@" (one-or-more (any word "-.:?!`'/*@+|()<>&_^$#%&~")))
>
> Nothing bad could happen, right?

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being getting an error message and having to go online
to find out what it means, and 10 being the total and utter destruction of our
solar system, I doubt it'll exceed 1.

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments