Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Richard Lawrence]

Rasmus <address@hidden> writes:

> Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Richard Lawrence <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Sorry, I may not have emphasized this enough, but in the grammar, I wrote:
>>>
>>>   - A KEY optionally begins with `-', and obligatorily contains `@' or
>>>     `&' followed by a string of characters which begins with a letter
>>>     or `_', and may contain alphanumeric characters and the following
>>>     *internal* punctuation characters:
>>>        :.#$%&-+?<>~/
>
> AFAIK Bibtex keys don't understand '#%~', so I'd remove those.  I would
> leave out '$' as well, as it's also the math symbol (think of display
> support).

I don't think we should remove these just because BibTeX doesn't support
them.  They might be used as keys by other citation databases, and
removing them might break them.

The syntax of KEYs (except for `&') is wholly borrowed from Pandoc,
which I figured had a reason for permitting those characters.  Note that
Pandoc reads reference databases in a lot of different formats,
including MODS, EndNote, etc., which might be more liberal with symbols
in keys:

http://pandoc.org/README.html#citations

So unless we decide we don't want to support people who use these
formats, I suggest we be more liberal here, too.  This won't cause a
problem for BibTeX users. 

Best,
Richard