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gobib

This package is a yet-to-be-fully-tested stupid program to convert plain TeX bibliography file into structured BibTeX, and I'm primarly writing it for my personal use hoping it'll be helpful for someone else too.

Installing

go get https://github.com/nbena/gobib/cmd/gobib

Usage

Assuming the your plain TeX file is bib.tex, and you want to write to bib.bib, invoking the program is very easy:

gobib -input=bib.tex -output=bib.bib

The help message:

Usage of ./gobib:
  -default-urldate string
        the default urldate value to use, the format is YYYY-MM-DD
  -default-year int
        the default year value to use when a year is not found
  -in string
        the input file
  -out string
        the output file
  -print-finished
        print a message when conversion is finished

How it works

The program applies very simple heuristic that works fine for my use cases:

  • the base case is:

      \bibitem{}
  author1, author2, authorn, title, \url, year

    or

    \bibitem{}
author1, author2, authorn, title, year, \url

  • when an URL is not found (the program will search for \url) it simply won't be added, and the last item will be considered the title.

  • the program will search for a valid year in the last, or last - 1 items of each bib item, in that case, the title will just be the item before the year.

  • the program can add a default year and urldate, but only if you want to. Don't invoke this options (default-year and default-urldate) to not add default values.

  • any other element inside an item will be probably considered an author.

  • the default generated Bibitem element is @online, this will maybe change in future but I don't think so.

The program by default reads from stdin and writes to stdout using a 3-stage pipeline running 3 goroutines:

  1. one for extract raw items from the input
  2. one for parsing raw items into structured Bibitems
  3. one for writing

Reading stops at EOF or better, at \end{thebibliography}. The first error that occurs causes the program to exit.

Example

Given the following input:

\begin{thebibliography}{10}

    \bibitem{how-to-be}
    Foo Bar, How to be
  
    \bibitem{adv}
    F. Bar, Advanced Topics in Advanced Topics, 2018
  
    \bibitem{you-me}
    You, Me, How is it possible that You is not Me,
    \url{https://example.com/youvsme}
  
    \bibitem{yabe}
    One Author, Another One, YABE -- Yet Another Bib Entry,
    \url{https://example.com/yabe}, 2018
  
    \bibitem{yabe2}
    One Author, YABE2 -- A revision of YABE, 2018
    \url{https://example.com/yabe2}
  
\end{thebibliography}

Running:

gobib -in=input.tex -out=output.bib -default-year=2018

You get:

@online{how-to-be,
    author = "Foo Bar",
    title = "How to be",
    year = "2018",
}

@online{adv,
    author = "F. Bar",
    title = "Advanced Topics in Advanced Topics",
    year = "2018",
}

@online{you-me,
    author = "You and Me",
    title = "How is it possible that You is not Me",
    year = "2018",
    url = "https://example.com/youvsme",
}

@online{yabe,
    author = "One Author and Another One",
    title = "YABE -- Yet Another Bib Entry",
    year = "2018",
    url = "https://example.com/yabe",
}

@online{yabe2,
    author = "One Author",
    title = "YABE2 -- A revision of YABE",
    year = "2018",
    url = "https://example.com/yabe2",
}

License

GPL3