Multiple namesep options?

[wspr]

At some point I noticed that malformed bibtex files from journal websites were sometimes being constructed with semicolons between author names:

AUTHOR = { Will Robertson; John Robertson; Joe Blogs } ,

And I had an epiphany that this is how bibtex files should have been designed from the very beginning. I presume it is possible to allow biber to support this with --namesep=; but the manual rightly points out the portability issues this creates — more importantly (for me), I don't want to have to edit hundreds and hundreds of bibtex entries I've made over the years manually.

Would there be any chance that biber could be extended to allow multiple namesep options so that we could support more than one syntax? E.g. --extranamesep=; would keep and and also support ;

[plk]

Unfortunately, the underlying library used for this is very old and doesn't do regexps, just fixed strings. It's different in Biber's extended name format - much more flexible. I would probably just take the time to use biber tool mode to convert everything to a standard format since there is an "--output-namesep" option for selecting the output name separator.

[wspr]

Thanks for the response — I can appreciate that. Great suggestion, I wasn't aware of the biber tool mode (to be honest I basically just use biber as a drop-in replacement for bibtex still).