biblatex2xml: Conversion of "date" fields still broken

[Nick Bart]

biblatex2xml's conversion of "date" fields, as discussed previously in, e.g., https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/pandoc-discuss/uzxF4AGaoUM, is still broken:

Using biblatex2xml, "book" entries with "date" fields (whether YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD) do not produce ANY any kind of date output at all.

("book" entries with "year" fields produce, e.g., "<dateIssued>2012</dateIssued>", as expected.)

"article" entries with "date" fields, however, do produce output that looks ok, e.g., "<dateIssued>2012-07-23</dateIssued>".

Could you please look into this? I assume it's an easy fix, and it would be much appreciated.

[Chris Putnam]

Version 4.16 will now process 'date' with all reference types. It looks like the biblatex documentation that I've been using is either out of date or simply wrong. Thanks for the heads up.

[Nick Bart]

Great. You probably know that in biblatex date ranges are allowed, too. The format is "YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD". At least for "article" entries, biblatex2xml gives, e.g., "<dateissued>2012-07-23/2012-08-27</dateissued>", which looks ok to me. [EDIT: No, it doesn’t. See post below.]

citeproc-hs or pandoc apparently cannot handle date ranges yet, but I’ll ask for a fix there …

The latest biblatex manual is http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf (currently v 2.3).

[Nick Bart]

Simply copying a date range in the biblatex format over to MODS might not be correct, however.
It should probably done like this:

<originInfo>
  <dateIssued encoding="iso8601" point="start">2012-07-23</dateIssued>
  <dateIssued encoding="iso8601" point="end">2012-08-27</dateIssued>
</originInfo>

[Nick Bart]

One more detail: Presently, a biblatex article entry containing

Date = {1987-02-23},
Year = {1987},
Month = {feb},

is converted by biblatex2xml to an entry containing

<originInfo><dateIssued>1987-02-23</dateIssued>
<part><date>1987-feb</date>

In biblatex, however, the fields year and month should only be considered if no date field can be found (for backwards compatibility with traditional BibTeX). Only in this case, year and month fields should be considered; they should of course be converted to an ISO 8601 representation of the form YYYY-MM.