BibTeX-Ruby

BibTeX-Ruby is the Rubyist's swiss-army-knife for all things BibTeX. It includes a parser for all common BibTeX objects (@string, @preamble, @comment and regular entries) and a sophisticated name parser that tokenizes correctly formatted names; BibTeX-Ruby recognizes BibTeX string replacements, joins values containing multiple strings or variables, supports cross-references, and decodes common LaTeX formatting instructions to unicode; if you are in a hurry, it also allows for easy export/conversion to formats such as YAML, JSON, CiteProc/CSL, XML (BibTeXML, requires rexml), and RDF (experimental).

For a list of projects using BibTeX-Ruby, take a look at the project wiki.

Quickstart

Install and load BibTeX-Ruby in an IRB session:

$ [sudo] gem install bibtex-ruby
$ irb
>> require 'bibtex'

Open a BibTeX bibliography:

b = BibTeX.open('./ruby.bib')

Select a BibTeX entry and access individual fields:

b['pickaxe'].title
#=> "Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide"
b[:pickaxe].author.length
#=> 3
b[:pickaxe].author.to_s
#=> "Thomas, D. and Fowler, Chad and Hunt, Andy"
b[:pickaxe].author[2].first
#=> "Andy"

Query a bibliography:

b['@book'].length
#=> 3 - the number books in the bibliography
b['@article'].length
#=> 0 - the number of articles in the bibliography
b['@book[year=2009]'].length
#=> 1 - the number of books published in 2009

Extend first name initials throughout your bibliography:

b.extend_initials ['Dave', 'Thomas']
b[:pickaxe].author.to_s
#=> "Thomas, Dave and Fowler, Chad and Hunt, Andy"

You can also extend all names in the bibliography to their prototypical (i.e., the longest available) form:

b.extend_initials! #=> extends all names in the bibliography

Use with caution as this method will treat two names as identical if they look the same in their #sort_order(:initials => true) form.

Unify certain fields across the bibliography:

b.unify :publisher, /o'?reilly/i, "O'Reilly"

b.unify :publisher, /^penguin/i do |entry|
  entry.publisher = 'Penguin Books'
  entry.address = 'London'
end

This will unify various spellings of entries published by O'Reilly and Penguin.

Render your bibliography in one of many different citation styles (requires the citeproc-ruby gem):

require 'citeproc'
CiteProc.process b[:pickaxe].to_citeproc, :style => :apa
#=> "Thomas, D., Fowler, C., & Hunt, A. (2009). Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. The Facets of Ruby. Raleigh, North Carolina: The Pragmatic Bookshelf."
CiteProc.process b[:pickaxe].to_citeproc, :style => 'chicago-author-date'
#=> "Thomas, Dave, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt. 2009. Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. The Facets of Ruby.Raleigh, North Carolina: The Pragmatic Bookshelf."
CiteProc.process b[:pickaxe].to_citeproc, :style => :mla
#=> "Thomas, Dave, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt. Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. Raleigh, North Carolina: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009."

Save a bibliography to a file:

b.save
#=> saves the original file
b.save_to(file)
#=> saves the bibliography in a new file

Compatibility

The BibTeX-Ruby gem has been developed and tested on Ruby 2.x, 1.9.3, and 1.8; it has been confirmed to work with JRuby, Rubinius, and REE, however, there have been repeated issues (performance mostly) with MacRuby caused by MacRuby's current StringScanner implementation.

Starting with BibTeX-Ruby version 3.0, support for Ruby versions 1.9.2 and earlier has been dropped; most features will likely continue to work, but compliance with old Rubies is not a priority going forward.

Starting with BibTex-Ruby version 7.0, only ruby versions still in "security maintenance phase" will be supported. This is, as of writing Ruby 2.7 and up.

Documentation

It is very easy to use BibTeX-Ruby. You can use the top level utility methods BibTeX.open and BibTeX.parse to open a '.bib' file or to parse a string containing BibTeX contents. By default, BibTeX-Ruby will discard all text outside of regular BibTeX elements; however, if you wish to include everything, simply add :include => [:meta_content] to your invocation of BibTeX.open or BibTeX.parse.

Once BibTeX-Ruby has parsed your '.bib' file, you can easily access individual entries. For example, if you set up your bibliography as follows:

b = BibTeX.parse <<-END
@book{pickaxe,
  address = {Raleigh, North Carolina},
  author = {Thomas, Dave and Fowler, Chad and Hunt, Andy},
  publisher = {The Pragmatic Bookshelf},
  series = {The Facets of Ruby},
  title = {Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide},
  year = {2009}
}
END

You could easily access it, using the entry's key, 'pickaxe', like so: b[:pickaxe]; you also have easy access to individual fields, for example: b[:pickaxe][:author]. Alternatively, BibTeX-Ruby accepts ghost methods to conveniently access an entry's fields, similar to ActiveRecord::Base. Therefore, it is equally possible to access the 'author' field above as b[:pickaxe].author.

BibTeX-Ruby wraps all values of fields in an entry in Value objects. This is necessary to transparently handle different types of values (e.g., strings, dates, names etc.). These Value objects are designed to be hardly discernible from regular Ruby strings, however, if you ever run into a problem with a field's value, simply convert it to a string by calling the #to_s method.

Instead of parsing strings you can also create BibTeX elements directly in Ruby:

bib = BibTeX::Bibliography.new

Using a Hash:

bib << BibTeX::Entry.new({
  :bibtex_type => :book,
  :key => :rails,
  :address => 'Raleigh, North Carolina',
  :author => 'Ruby, Sam and Thomas, Dave, and Hansson, David Heinemeier',
  :booktitle => 'Agile Web Development with Rails',
  :edition => 'third',
  :keywords => 'ruby, rails',
  :publisher => 'The Pragmatic Bookshelf',
  :series => 'The Facets of Ruby',
  :title => 'Agile Web Development with Rails',
  :year => '2009'
})

Or programmatically:

book = BibTeX::Entry.new
book.type = :book
book.key = :mybook
bib << book

Cross References

From version 2.0, BibTeX-Ruby correctly resolves entry cross-references, which are commonly used for entries with type inbook, incollection, and inproceedings. When an entry has a valid citation key in the field crossref, BibTeX-Ruby will return any fields inherited from the parent entry:

b = BibTeX.parse <<-END
@inbook{fraassen_1989b,
  Crossref = {fraassen_1989},
  Pages = {40-64},
  Title = {Ideal Science: David Lewis's Account of Laws},
}

@book{fraassen_1989,
  Address = {Oxford},
  Author = {Bas C. van Fraassen},
  Publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  Title = {Laws and Symmetry},
  Year = 1989
}
END
> b['fraassen_1989b'].booktitle
#=> <"Laws and Symmetry">

Queries

Since version 1.3 BibTeX-Ruby implements a simple query language to search Bibliographies via the Bibliography#query (or Bibliography#q) methods. Additionally, you can access individual elements or groups of elements via their index using Bibliography#[]; this accessor also exposes some of the query functionality with the exception of yielding to a block. For instance:

bib[-1]
#=> Returns the last element of the Bibliography or nil
bib[1,2]
#=> Returns the second and third elements or nil
bib[1..2]
#=> Same as above

bib[:key]
#=> Returns the first entry with key 'key' or nil
bib['key']
#=> Returns all entries with key 'key' or []

bib['@article']
#=> Returns all entries of type 'article' or []
bib['!@book']
#=> Returns all entries of any type other than 'book' or []
bib['@preamble']
#=> Returns all preamble objects (this is the same as Bibliography#preambles) or []
bib[/ruby/]
#=> Returns all objects that match 'ruby' anywhere or []

bib['@incollection[booktitle]']
#=> Returns all in-collection entries with a booktitle or []

# note that the above includes entries inheriting the book title
# from a cross-referenced entry!

bib['@book[keywords=ruby]']
#=> Returns all books whose keywords attribute equals 'ruby' or []
bib['@book[keywords!=ruby]']
#=> Returns all books whose keywords attribute does not equal 'ruby'
bib['@book[keywords/=ruby]']
#=> Same as above

bib.q('@book[keywords ^= ruby]')
#=> Returns all books whose keywords attribute matches /^ruby/
bib.q('@book[keywords ~= ruby]')
#=> Returns all books whose keywords attribute matches /ruby/
bib['@book[keywords!~ruby]']
#=> Returns all books whose keywords attribute does not match /ruby/ or don't have keywords attribute

bib.q('@article[year<=2007]')
#=> Returns all articles published in 2007 or earlier
bib.query('@book') { |e| e.keywords.split(/,/).length > 1 }
#=> Returns all book entries with two or more keywords or []

Queries offer syntactic sugar for common enumerator invocations:

bib.query(:all, '@book')
#=> same as bib.select { |b| b.has_type?(:book) }
bib.query('@book')
#=> same as above
bib.query(:first, '@book')
#=> same as bib.detect { |b| b.has_type?(:book) }
bib.query(:none, '@book')
#=> same as bib.reject { |b| b.has_type?(:book) }

You can also use queries to delete entries in your bibliography:

bib.delete(/ruby/)
#=> deletes all object that match 'ruby' in their string representation
bib.delete('@comment')
#=> strips all BibTeX comments from the bibliography

String Replacement

If your bibliography contains BibTeX @string objects, you can let BibTeX-Ruby replace the strings for you. You have access to a bibliography's strings via BibTeX::Bibliography#strings or by using a '@string' query. You can replace the string symbols of an object by calling the object's the replace method. Thus, to replace all strings defined in bibliography b you could use the following code:

b.each do |obj|
  obj.replace(b.q('@string'))
end

A shorthand version for replacing all strings in a given bibliography is the Bibliography#replace method. Similarly, you can use the Bibliography#join method to join individual strings together. For instance:

    bib = BibTeX::Bibliography.new
    bib.add BibTeX::Element.parse '@string{ foo = "foo" }'
    bib << BibTeX::Element.parse '@string{ bar = "bar" }'
    bib.add BibTeX::Element.parse <<-END
     @book{abook,
       author = foo # "Author",
       title = foo # bar
     }
    END
    puts bib[:abook].to_s
    #@book{abook,
    #  author = foo # "Author",
    #  title = foo # bar
    #}
    bib.replace
    puts bib[:abook].to_s
    #@book{abook,
    #  author = "foo" # "Author",
    #  title = "foo" # "bar"
    #}
    bib.join
    #@book{abook,
    #  author = {fooAuthor},
    #  title = {foobar}
    #}

Names

Since version 1.3, BibTeX-Ruby features a name parser. You can use the top-level BibTeX.names utility to quickly parse individual name values. Alternatively, you can call Bibliography.parse_names to convert all name fields contained in the bibliography. When parsing BibTeX files, BibTeX-Ruby will automatically convert names; if you do not want the names to be parsed you can set the :parse_names parser option to false.

Note that the string replacement and concatenation features described above are not supported for name objects; therefore, BibTeX-Ruby tries to replace and join all values before name conversion; name fields containing string symbols that cannot be replaced will not be parsed.

In the following example, string replacement can take place, thus all names are parsed and can easily be mapped to their last names:

BibTeX.parse(<<-END)[1].author.map(&:last)
  @string{ ht = "Nathaniel Hawthorne" }
  @book{key,
    author = ht # " and Melville, Herman"
  }
  END
#=> ["Hawthorne", "Melville"]

Another useful method is Bibliography#names which returns all names in your bibliography (authors, editors, translators). For example, to quickly expand the initials of a name across your entire bibliography, you could use the following snippet:

b.names.each do |name|
  if name.sort_order =~ /^Poe, E/
    name.first = 'Edgar Allen'
  end
end

There is also a short-hand for this use case:

b.extend_initials ['Edgar Allen', 'Poe']

Alternatively, if your bibliography contains the same names in various forms (e.g., 'Poe, Edgar A.', 'Poe, E.A.', 'Poe, E. Allen') you can also set all names to their longest available form:

b.extend_initials!

Use with caution, though, as this method will treat names as identical as long as their initials are the same. That is to say, 'Poe, Eric A.' would be extend to 'Poe, Edgar Allen'.

Duplicates

Large bibliographies often contain duplicate data, i.e., duplicate entries which are not completely identical (e.g., authors or editors with first names or initials, titles using different casing, different keywords etc.). BibTex-Ruby allows you to group your bibliography by any number of fields in order to detect such duplicate entries.

b.select_duplicates_by :year, :title
#=> groups the bibliography by using the year and title field as key

b.duplicates?
#=> whether or not the bibliography contains any duplicates

For more complex requirements you can use the #group_by method directly. This methods accepts a list of arguments whose value will be used for grouping and, additionally, a block. The current digest and each individual entry will be passed to the block and the block's return value is used as the final digest.

The duplicate methods above, for example, do something like this:

group_by(:year, :title) do |digest, entry|
  digest.gsub(/\s+/, '').downcase
end

You can use this method, for example, to match entries only by their author's last name and so on and so forth.

Since version 4.1.0, BibTeX-ruby supports parsing of names spelled in the East Asian order (last name, then first name). Names contain a Chinese, Japanese or Korean letter are currently assumed to be such names. If the name is written in comma-separated manner, it is parsed in the normal way.

b = BibTeX.parse(<<-END)
@book{key,
  title = "プログラミング言語 Ruby",
  author = "David Flanagan and まつもと ゆきひろ",
  translator = "卜部, 昌平 and 長尾, 高弘",
  year = "2009",
  publisher = "O'Reilly Japan"
}
END
[*b[0].author, *b[0].translator].map(&:last) #=> [Flanagan, まつもと, 卜部, 長尾]

Filters

Since version 1.3.8 BibTeX-Ruby comes with a plugin framework for input filters. You can use the methods convert and convert! methods if Value, Entry and Bibliography instances to easily convert string values according to a given filter. Starting with version 1.3.9 BibTeX-Ruby includes a LaTeX filter that depends on the latex-decode gem. Example:

faust = '@book{faust, title = {Faust: Der Trag\"odie Erster Teil}}'
BibTeX.parse(faust).convert(:latex)[:faust].title
#=> "Faust: Der Tragödie Erster Teil"

Conditional conversions are also supported:

faust1 = '@book{faust1, title = {Faust: Der Trag\"odie Erster Teil}}'
faust2 = '@book{faust2, title = {Faust: Der Trag\"odie Zweiter Teil}}'
p BibTeX.parse(faust1 + faust2).convert(:latex) { |e| e.key == :faust2 }.to_s

Returns:

@book{faust1,
  title = {Faust: Der Trag\"odie Erster Teil}
}
@book{faust2,
  title = {Faust: Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil}
}

If you need to express a condition on the basis of individual fields, use the conversion methods of BibTeX::Entry with a block instead (the block will be passed the key and value of each field prior to conversion).

When working with Bibliographies that contain LaTeX it is often best to apply the filter upon opening or parsing the Bibliography. You can do this, by passing the :filter option:

BibTeX.open 'references.bib', :filter => :latex

Exports

Furthermore, BibTeX-Ruby allows you to export your bibliography for processing by other tools. Currently supported formats include YAML, JSON, and XML.

Of course, you can also export your bibliography back to BibTeX; if you include `:meta_content', your export should be identical to the original '.bib' file, except for whitespace, blank lines and letter case (BibTeX-Ruby will downcase all keys).

In order to export your bibliography use #to_s, #to_yaml, #to_json, or #to_xml, respectively. For example, the following line constitutes a simple BibTeX to YAML converter:

BibTeX.open('example.bib').to_yaml

Starting with version 2.0, BibTeX-Ruby's #to_xml exports your bibliography to the BibTeXML format via rexml. By passing the option :extended => true you can make use of the BibTeXML's extended format which will return individual person elements and name tokens (provided you have successfully parsed the names of your bibliography).

BibTeX.parse(<<-END).to_xml(:extended => true).write($stdout, 2)
@book{pickaxe,
  Address = {Raleigh, North Carolina},
  Author = {Thomas, Dave, and Fowler, Chad, and Hunt, Andy},
  Publisher = {The Pragmatic Bookshelf},
  Title = {Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide},
  Year = {2009}
}
END

This example parse a BibTeX entry, formats it as extended BibTeXML, and writes the following XML to standard out:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<bibtex:file xmlns:bibtex='http://bibtexml.sf.net/'>
  <bibtex:entry id='pickaxe'>
    <bibtex:book>
      <bibtex:address>Raleigh, North Carolina</bibtex:address>
      <bibtex:author>
        <bibtex:person>
          <bibtex:first>Dave</bibtex:first>
          <bibtex:last>Thomas</bibtex:last>
        </bibtex:person>
        <bibtex:person>
          <bibtex:first>Chad</bibtex:first>
          <bibtex:last>Fowler</bibtex:last>
        </bibtex:person>
        <bibtex:person>
          <bibtex:first>Andy</bibtex:first>
          <bibtex:last>Hunt</bibtex:last>
        </bibtex:person>
      </bibtex:author>
      <bibtex:publisher>The Pragmatic Bookshelf</bibtex:publisher>
      <bibtex:title>
        Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer&apos;s Guide
      </bibtex:title>
      <bibtex:year>2009</bibtex:year>
    </bibtex:book>
  </bibtex:entry>
</bibtex:file>

Look at the 'examples' directory for more elaborate examples of a BibTeX to YAML and a BibTeX to HTML converter using #to_citeproc to format a bibliography using CSL.

BibTeX-Ruby offers an API which lets you manipulate BibTeX objects (string replacement, name parsing etc.); however, sometimes you just want quick access to your bibliography's contents. In these cases the to_hash method is useful (use to_a if you are only interested in the bibliography's contents): it converts all objects into simple Ruby hashes made up of symbols and strings. Furthermore, often you would like to control what sort of quotes are used in an export; therefore, all conversion methods accept an options hash which lets you define what quotes to use (note that BibTeX-Ruby will always use regular double quotes if a value consists of more than one token, because these tokens will be concatenated using BibTeX's '#' operator).

BibTeX.parse(<<-END).to_a # implies: :quotes => ['{','}']
@book{pickaxe,
  Address = {Raleigh, North Carolina},
  Author = {Thomas, Dave, and Fowler, Chad, and Hunt, Andy},
  Publisher = {The Pragmatic Bookshelf},
  Title = {Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide},
  Year = {2009}
}
END
#=> [{:bibtex_key=>:pickaxe, :bibtex_type=>:book,
#  :address=>"{Raleigh, North Carolina}",
#  :author=>"{Thomas, Dave, and Fowler, Chad, and Hunt, Andy}",
#  :publisher=>"{The Pragmatic Bookshelf}",
#  :title=>"{Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide}",
#  :year=>"{2009}"}]

For post-processing in Ruby most of the time you do not need any explicit quotes; therefore you can simply add the :quotes option with an empty string:

>> BibTeX.parse(<<-END).to_a(:quotes => '')
...
END
#=> [{:bibtex_key=>:pickaxe, :bibtex_type=>:book,
#  :address=>"Raleigh, North Carolina",
#  :author=>"Thomas, Dave, and Fowler, Chad, and Hunt, Andy",
#  :publisher=>"The Pragmatic Bookshelf",
#  :title=>"Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide",
#  :year=>"2009"}]

The Parser

The BibTeX-Ruby parser is generated using the awesome racc parser generator. You can take look at the LALR grammar in the file lib/bibtex/bibtex.y.

For more information about the BibTeX format and the parser's idiosyncrasies refer to the project wiki.

Contributing

The BibTeX-Ruby source code is hosted on GitHub. You can check out a copy of the latest code using Git:

$ git clone https://github.com/inukshuk/bibtex-ruby.git

If you've found a bug or have a question, please open an issue on the BibTeX-Ruby issue tracker. For extra credit, clone the BibTeX-Ruby repository, write a failing example, or cucumber feature, fix the bug and submit a pull request (for useful examples, take a look at the cucumber features in the features/issues/ directory).

The parser generator racc is required to generate the BibTeX parser and the name parser; you do not need to install it to use the bibtex-ruby gem.

To run the tests and cucumber examples execute these commands (from within the bibtex-ruby directory):

$ [sudo] gem install bundler
$ [sudo] bundle install
$ bundle exec rake

To execute the test suite continuously while you're working run:

$ bundle exec guard

Credits

Copyright 2011-2015 Sylvester Keil.

Kudos to all contributors who have made BibTeX-Ruby possible.

This software is distributed under the terms and conditions of the GNU GPL. See LICENSE for details.