citeproc-bt--to-csl-names: Args out of range: "", 0, 1

[Ossifragus]

The recent update to 20211127.936 does not work and gives the following error:

citeproc-bt--to-csl-names: Args out of range: "", 0, 1

Here is a minimal working example

#+bibliography: ~/Dropbox/mydoc/CV/papers.bib
#+cite_export: csl ~/Dropbox/mydoc/web/style/APA-CV.csl
[cite:@paper2021]

[andras-simonyi]

Thanks for the report! I've pushed a commit which should fix the problem, but it would be useful if you could post the offending entry (paper2021) as well -- my guess is that it contains a not entirely well formed name field.

[Ossifragus]

Thank you very much for your prompt response. The problem is fixed. The entry in the example is below. Are these empty entries, e.g., pages and editor causing the problem? I tried to replace \textbf{Wang, H.} with Wang, H., and this does not seem to be the reason.

@InProceedings{paper2021,
  title =    {Nonuniform Negative Sampling and Log Odds Correction with Rare Events Data},
    author           = {\textbf{Wang, H.} and Zhang, Aonan and Wang, Chong},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of The 35 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021).},
  pages =    {},
  year =     {2021},
  editor =   {},
  volume =   {},
  series =   {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
}

[bdarcus]

I don't think that should be a problem; I ran your example through bibtools and bibutils and neither complained about any error, or yielded unexpected results.

[andras-simonyi]

Well, the code in citeproc-el assumed that there are no empty fields in the entries but apparently this is a thing (BTW, are there tools that actually create such fields?) so I added a filter to the bibtex->CSL converter which simply removes them. Hopefully this resolves the issue.

[bdarcus]

I assume some GUI apps do.

But bibutils, for example, strips them.

[Ossifragus]

Well, the code in citeproc-el assumed that there are no empty fields in the entries but apparently this is a thing (BTW, are there tools that actually create such fields?) so I added a filter to the bibtex->CSL converter which simply removes them. Hopefully this resolves the issue.

Yes, the issue is resolved. Many thanks again. I often use BibTeX-Mode to insert a template and then edit each key. Sometime I need to update certain keys later so I just leave them empty (probably a bad habit).

[Ossifragus]

bibutils

Thank you for pointing out bibutils. I never used it before but will check it out.