Overzealous escaping of backslash

[Former user]

Reading and writing to file (at least with the default mechanisms) does not produce a transparent result (it should). The following Python

from pybtex.database.input import bibtex

bib_data = bibtex.Parser().parse_file('some_file_in.bib')
bib_data.to_file('some_file_out.bib')

...does not produce an output that is equivalent to the input for how latex bibliographic tools later handle the file. (That the file is not the same is not a problem, but there are latex-syntax errors.)

In my particular case I fed

% 'some_file_in'
@misc{Speth.2016,
 abstract = {},
 author = {Speth, Raymond L.},
 year = {2016},
 title = {adiabatic{\_}flame.py},
 url = {http://cantera.org/docs/sphinx/html/cython/examples/onedim_adiabatic_flame.html}
}

and the output is

% 'some_file_out'
@misc{Speth.2016,
    author = "Speth, Raymond L.",
    abstract = "",
    year = "2016",
    title = "adiabatic{\\_}flame.py",
    url = "http://cantera.org/docs/sphinx/html/cython/examples/onedim\_adiabatic\_flame.html"
}

Notice the title field; later on, {\_} is not parsed correctly by my lualatex/biber combination.

[mikedeplume]

I needed this when trying to reconstruct a bib file by merging subsets from other bib files. I managed by commenting out the ulatex encoding in …output.bibtex.py

Not satisfactory, but did the job.

[Andreas Naumann]

Is it possible to extend the bibtex writer with an option “no-decode” (or similar)? Then the user might decide what to do, when calling database.to_string(...)