DONT WRITE BACK TO YOUR BIBTEX-FILE: custom fields are imported with column-names that includes the values in the fields...!! about bibtex HOT 5 OPEN

Please note that your input bibtex entry is invalid - for entries of type inproceedings the field booktitle is compulsory for the standard bibtex styles. Also, I am surprised that bibtex even parsed it, since my slightly older version of package bibtex, v0.4.2.2, gives this:

> bibtex::read.bib("bibtex_issue.bib")
ignoring entry 'joulin2017bag' (line 1) because :
	A bibentry of bibtype ‘InProceedings’ has to specify the field: booktitle

Please note that the tone of your posting is insulting, maybe unintentionally. You have given a good description of your problem, perceived or not, for the maintainers (I am not among them) to look at. And that should have been it.

from bibtex.

I don't agree with you that it's insultating - to you, perhaps, but not generally. Of course that's not my intention: I'm stating that this bug seems to be so severe, that it should not be used to write a .bib-file, since this bug will in all likehood scramble the original bib-input. This seems to me to be aa very important point to get through, before anybody wrecks something important.

from bibtex.

The ALL CAPS and double exclamation points in the title... so authoritative and you couldn't even bother to create a reproducible bug report. Your post is 'insultating' to any developer. I conclude your GitHub comments "shouldn't be used" EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!

from bibtex.

This bug nearly ruined an important .bib file i was using, so the all caps and !! was with the intention of making sure nobody else ruined something important they were doing.

I find your suggestion that I "didn't bother including a reprex" to be rude - I spent quite a bit of time figuring out what the error was, so I could post it here.

But of course, if two different people both thinks I wrote the report in a rude manner, I will take that into consideration. There was no bad faith involved, however. The all caps and exclamation mark was probably a bad idea.

from bibtex.

Leaving aside other discussions, I think there is a fair point on here. I would propose to implement a mechanism for creating a backup of the bib file just in case something goes wrong. I already did this on cffr:

https://github.com/ropensci/cffr/blob/855608c8f6d3d7da0180db3e978143a288b6558b/R/write_bib.R#L65:L79

  # If exists creates a backup
  if (file.exists(file)) {
    for (i in seq(1, 100)) {
      f <- paste0(file, ".bk", i)
      if (!file.exists(f)) break
    }

    if (verbose) {
      message(
        "Creating a backup of ",
        file, " in ", f
      )
    }
    file.copy(file, f)
  }

from bibtex.