Replace date with fields year and month for incomplete dates

[phdoerfler]

Enhancement

Actual behavior

Currently BBT creates .bib entries like this:

@online{Panther2005,
  title = {Bayer {{Filter Goose}}},
  author = {{Panther}},
  date = {2005-02},
  url = {https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Bayer_filter_all.png},
  file = {/Users/phi/Zotero/storage/ITJCBNKN/Panther - 2005 - Bayer Filter Goose.png},
  keywords = {SPIHT}
}

which generates the following warning when used with Biber:

'Panther2005' (bib/spiht.bib): Invalid format '2005-02' of date field 'date' - ignoring

Proposed behavior

I propose that instead any incomplete date field is dropped, i.e., all date fields that are not YYYY-MM-DD and are thus considered invalid by Biber.
Instead, the fields year and month could be used to encode incomplete dates.
Many publications do not provide a precise date with a day on which they were released but only a year and a month, sometimes just the year.

Right now, I have added tex.month and tex.year manually which results in this entry:

@online{Panther2005,
  title = {Bayer {{Filter Goose}}},
  author = {{Panther}},
  date = {2005-02},
  year = {2005},
  month = {02},
  url = {https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Bayer_filter_all.png},
  file = {/Users/phi/Zotero/storage/ITJCBNKN/Panther - 2005 - Bayer Filter Goose.png},
  keywords = {SPIHT}
}

As expected, this still results in this warning message:

'Panther2005' (bib/spiht.bib): Invalid format '2005-02' of date field 'date' - ignoring

And this quality complaint in the generated .bib:

% Exactly one of 'date' / 'year' must be present

which I assume can be worked around by manually keeping BBT from exporting the date field on a per reference basis. I'd rather want this to be done automatically, however.

Report ID: 8DIR3AQ9-euc

Exporter used: Better BibLaTeX

[retorquere]

@njbart? I thought date was always preferred over year and month?

[phdoerfler]

I couldn't find it in the documentation but I found out that by setting…

tex.date=

…it makes BBT omit date:

@online{Panther2005,
  title = {Bayer {{Filter Goose}}},
  author = {{Panther}},
  year = {2005},
  month = {02},
  url = {https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Bayer_filter_all.png},
  file = {/Users/phi/Zotero/storage/ITJCBNKN/Panther - 2005 - Bayer Filter Goose.png},
  keywords = {SPIHT}
}

…which in turn makes Biber happy and gets rid of the warning. For me this is an acceptable work around for the time being and I guess I could write a javascript postscript that would do that but I'd rather not go down that rabbit hole for now. I still would much prefer if BBT was smart enough to do this on its own.
Also many thanks for making this wonderful extension in the first place ❤️

[retorquere]

It'd be very easy for me to do if it is actually the desired behavior; I don't know, but @jnbart usually does.

[njbart]

In biblatex, date is indeed always preferred over year and month. (Quoting the manual (v 3.14, p. 26), on the year field, “It is however better to use the date field as this is compatible with plain years too and supports many more features.”) What’s more, the manual explicitly lists 1967-02 among the examples of valid date specifications (p. 38; and this hasn’t changed for, literally, decades). I can’t reproduce the alleged warning message either (using the most recent biber 2.14 and biblatex 3.14). So I don’t see any reason at all to change anything.

[phdoerfler]

tl;dr: The warnings went away mysteriously and I can no longer reproduce them either. I git stashed the changes to my .bib file that BBT did and then unstashed them which re-applied them again.

@njbart That is very interesting, thanks for digging this up! Today I have had massive problems with biblatex where it would fail the compile but report no errors. After hours of scratching my head, going through the generated .bib and never finding any gross mistake and repeatedly cleaning all generated files and changing things here and there I eventually stashed all the changes to my .bib file that Zotero did and went back to a previous version and closed Zotero which was, until then, running in the background.
With the changes stashed everything compiled fine, which was reassuring and what I hoped for and cautiously expected.

What I did not expect was this: I then re-applied the changes in my stash and lo and behold it still compiled. I cleaned up all auxiliary files that were generated by the compilation and tried again and it still compiled.

I have no idea why biblatex failed previously. Despite cleaning all generated files and even manually making sure everything but the .tex files and the .bib files was deleted it would still fail. I even restarted my entire machine to no avail. Aside from stashing and un-stashing the changes the only thing I did was to close Zotero. But if this even did anything I can not say.
It is troubling me that it is working again now and I do not know why.

One more thing that is noteworthy: There was one bib entry where biblatex would complain that 2004-09-27 was not a valid format for date. Which it clearly is. I was not able to find out what made this entry stand out from the others which had the same format but caused no complaints. Maybe it was the first one it processed since its citekey starts with an A and I think all the others come later. Either way, I'm glad this is over and I can no longer reproduce any of the warnings.
Unfortunately I did not check the .blg file because a couple hours ago I did not know that it might have contained information about the biblatex compilation. All I know is that biblatex exited with return code 2.

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