note philkime I've updated the original post with a minimal example displaying the problem. It seems to work when I write to a file instead of a string, which is strange. Even stranger is that when writing to a file, the order is wrong, I see the Text::BibTeX error at the top of the file and "manual error" after this. Buffering issue? Tried this on two different machines, perl 5.14.1 on both, one cygwin, one OSX. 929318 929357