Bug: tilde in "\~" is parsed as space

[Former user]

There seems to be a bug in pybtex/bibtex/utils.py in split_tex_string(), where a name such as 'Brand\~{a}o' gets incorrectly split because of the ~ character. Here, the ~ is part of the escape sequence \~ and is not a space.

I'm using pybtex to parse bibtex files (and it's really useful, thanks!). Here's an example of erroneous behavior:

>>> from pybtex.database import Person
>>> Person('Brand\~ao, F')
Person(u'Brand\\ ao, F')

I'm proposing a patch which fixes this (attached).

[Andrey Golovizin]

Turns out it's more complicated than that. :)

BibTeX does split the name at \~ and counts both parts of 'Brand\~{a}o' as last names:

>>> from pybtex.tests import run_bibtex
>>> p = run_bibtex.parse_name(r'Brand\~{a}o, F')
>>> print p.first(), p.middle(), p.prelast(), p.last()
>>> ['F'] [] [] ['Brand\\', '{a}o']

Then it joins them back again with ~ when outputting the .bbl file, so the output looks OK.

Pybtex currently thinks that 'Brand\' is a von name:

>>> from pybtex.tests import run_bibtex
>>> p = Person(r'Brand\~{a}o, F')
>>> print p.first(), p.middle(), p.prelast(), p.last()
>>> ['F'] [] ['Brand\\'] ['{a}o']

[Andrey Golovizin]

fb456fb: Fix corner cases in detecting von names - this should make Pybtex behave exactly like BibTeX.