Custom citation key format

[alexreg]

I would a citation key format like the following:

• Smith:1990
• Smith;Brown:2000
• Smith;ea:2010

Is this possible?

Note, surnames should retain capitalisation, though non-ASCII characters should be converted to ASCII equivalents. It would also be interesting to have a variant where prefixes like "de", "von", "van", etc. are prepended to the surname, e.g., "vonNeumann" (von Neumann, John), "tHooft" ('t Hooft, Gerardus) — but that's just a bonus.

[retorquere]

[authors2+;]:[year]

[alexreg]

Thanks, that's almost it! Two small issues:
a) Can I get it to use "ea" instead of "EtAl"?
b) It displays two authors and "EtAl" when I have three authors, whereas I want to always cap it at two "authors". i.e., "AuthorA;AuthorB" for two, "AuthorA;ea" for three or more.

[retorquere]

a) [authors2+;:replace=etal,ea]:[year]
b) is a reasonable addition, but you'd have to open an issue for that, and it will be at least a couple of days, maybe a week, before I can put any work in it, as I'm currently working on 3 issues in parallel already.

[alexreg]

No worries. Thanks for the quick replies.

[alexreg]

Oh, incidentally, that won't cause any problems if an author name just so happens to contain "etal" somewhere within, will it? (I don't know exactly how the replace thing works.)

[retorquere]

That would be a problem. :replace=;etal$,ea,regex should work except when the author is actually named etal. If it's really to replace the etal as a unit, I'd have to extend the authors syntax. Not off the table necessarily.