@comment behavior in BibTeX vs BibLaTeX
larsgw opened this issue · comments
biblatex
and natbib
treat @comment
entries differently. However, neither treat them as I implemented based on a summary I found, namely from @comment
to the end of the line (source). biblatex
seems to treat it as a regular entry (e.g. expecting opening braces and ignoring everything including other entries until the end brace), while natbib
seems to just ignore the @comment
text, so if an entry starts with @comment
instead of @book
it does nothing. However, it does not require @comment
to be an entry, as biblatex
does. Also, natbib
behavior differs from the aforementioned summary in that it still counts entries that start on the same line as @comment
, while the summary states "that everything from the @Comment
and to the end of line is ignored".
Examples:
@comment {
@misc{label,
author = "name",
title = "displays with natbib, not with biblatex",
year = 2019
}
}
@comment{ @misc{label2,
author = "name",
title = "displays with natbib, not with biblatex",
year = 2019
}
}
@comment @misc{label3,
author = "name",
title = "errors (fatally) with biblatex, displays with natbib",
year = 2019
}
@comment {} @misc{label4,
author = "name",
title = "displays with biblatex, natbib",
year = 2019
}
The biblatex manual makes no mention of @comment at all. It probably just wants balanced braces everywhere
Tame the Beast says
There is a special entry type named@comment. The main use of such an entry type is to comment a large partof the bibliography easily, since anything outside an entry is already a comment, and commenting out one entry may beachieved by just removing its initial@
which I take to mean you can wrap multiple entries in a @comment{....}
and have them commented out.
BibTeXing says
For Scribe compatibility, the database files allow an @comment command; it’s not really needed because BibTEX allows in the database files anycomment that’s not within an entry. If you want to comment out an entry, simply remove the ‘@’ character preceding the entry type.