Problem running Biblatex with bib file exported from Zotero

I solved my issues of compatibility between the BibTex file exported from Zotero and BibLatex. I recap the solution here. Apparently BibLatex is much more sensible than BibTex when it comes to reading a BibTex file...

To export correctly the bibliography from Zotero and then into a Tex document via BibLatex I used this BibTeX Export Translator (modified by Robin Wilson) with two important tweaks:

1) On line 11 of the translator script you need to set "exportNotes": true, to "exportNotes": false, (of course just in case you have added notes to your Zotero items, e.g. you extract annotations from PDFs). This will avoid BibLatex crashing on too long fields.

2) On line 2256 you need to tell the translator to avoid adding a comma after each bibliography item (the comma will result in BibLatex giving a warning on the first line of each entry excluding the first...) changing this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : ",\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey); with this line: Zotero.write((first ? "" : "\n\n") + "@"+type+"{"+citekey);

Another possible source of problems of the BibTeX Export Translator could be the character encoding. In my translator I kept as in source file "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", on line 10. I tried to change it to UTF-8 but it created another class of issues, not with BibLatex (it run without errors) but with Latex,

[1{/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]
(./bib/price2012.tex [2]
! Undefined control sequence.
<to be read again> \edef \blx@tempa {193\x 
                                           {FFFD}\x {FFFD}\x {FFFD}219}
l.8 \printbibliography[heading=subbibliography]

for each refsection. It also messed with the "pages" field of some items, outputting:

Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193fffdfffdfffd219.

I then switched back to "exportCharset": "ISO-8859-1", and both BibLatex and Latex run without warnings or errors. The PDF output was correct:

Andrea B. Hollingshead. “Information suppression and status persistence in group decision making the effects of communication media”. In: Human Communication Research 23.2 (1996), 193–219.

and I also get correct output with the umlaut of Habermas:

EDIT: The problem with the page field was probably due by a odd "-" character that you sometimes get to separate the 2 page numbers when you download the citation from the Internet.

The included field annote and abstract in your showed bib entries are too long (see your cited error message: Your field is more than 20000 characters). I guess you do not want to print them in your bibliography so you can delete them.

With a little pretty printing and minor corrections I came to the following MWE running with MiKTeX 2.9 and Biber without errors (package filecontents is used to have only one MWE, including both .tex and .bib file):

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{test1,
  author     = {Rainie, Lee and Wellman, Barry},
  publisher  = {{MIT} Press},
  title      = {Networked: The New Social Operating System},
  shorttitle = {short},
  address    = {Cambridge, {MA}},
  isbn       = {0262017199},
  year       = {2012},
}
@book{test2,
  address = {New York, {NY}},
  title      = {Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations},
  isbn       = {9780713999891},
  shorttitle = {Here Comes Everybody},
  publisher  = {Penguin Books},
  author     = {Shirky, Clay},
  year       = {2008},
  keywords   = {Francesco {PhD}},
}
\end{filecontents*}


\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
%\usepackage[Latin9]{inputenc}

% Set the values for the bibliography
\usepackage[
  backend=biber
% backend=bibtex8
 ,isbn=false
 ,url=false
 ,doi=false
 ,eprint=false
]{biblatex}

%Point to the bibliography db
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

\cite{test1} \cite{test2} \fullcite{test1}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

It seems you have an encoding problem with your files, because you said in your comment you still have a message about a junk character. Please check the encoding you have used in Zotero, could be you have to change it ... Thats the reasion why I used new first lines for your bib entrys (@book{test1,) written in my editor to be sure to have no junk characters there ...

Another problems seems that Zotero adds a comma (,) after the closing bracket of an bib entry. I deleted this commas for my MWE. That should not be! Correct is:

@book{key,
  name  = {value}, 
  name1 = {value1},
}             <===== here no comma! 

As you can read in this blog the commas are part of Zotero and they seem to be the jink character.

I just found an old question biblatex or biber bug that means in my opinion that Zotero is not able to create a bib file for biblatex/biber. So you should use BibTeX or change the bibliography program, for example jabref or something else.