Subject: bug#57712: 29.0.50; bibtex.el: Should `bibtex-parse-entry' handle curly braces inside fields?

From: Roland Winkler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:50:21 -0500

On Mon, Sep 12 2022, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> To clarify, I do not expect bibtex-parse-entry to strip the braces. What
> I'd like to see is _parsing_ braces (say, as sexp) and other special
> BibTeX syntax. At least, as long as appropriate option is passed to
> bibtex-parse-entry.

Can you give some examples of what you believe bibtex-parse-entry should
do if it had an optional arg CONTENT?  What should it return instead of
what it returns without such an arg?

> bibtex-summary approach might be an option, although it is clearly an
> abuse and begs for future bugs.

My point is: the meaning of CONTENT may largely depend on what the
caller of bibtex-parse-entry wants to achieve.  What appears perfectly
reasonable from your perspective may be meaningless from another
perspective.  That's why the autokey machinery comes with lots of
options in terms of user variables, plus the option of letting the user
ignore all of this and define her own function (both for automatically
generating a key and for generating a summary for an entry). -- It's not
a perfect solution.  But it has worked well for many years.

A single arg CONTENT (trying to guess "do what I mean") cannot cover all
this in a satisfactory way.