Bibstuff is a collection of scripts and modules for interacting with BibTeX style databases of citation references. The project contains a classes for parsing and storing BibTeX files, utilities for searching and labeling BibTeX entries, a utility for replacing in-text citations in a Re Structured text document, and a module for defining citation styles.

Command-line tools (scripts)

These tools are installed in you python scripts directory or they can be run directly from where they were unpacked. Each of these tools has a command line interface and provides the -h option to describe usage.

• add2bib.py

Convenient command-line interface for adding references to existing or new .bib files. User is prompted for a default set of fields, which can be changed by a command-line switch.

• bib4txt.py

Creates formatted references for a text dodument. (Useful for reStructuredText documents.) Interacts with a Bibtex style database file (without using LaTeX or bibtex). The source text file should include citation references in reStructuredText format: a citation key enclosed in brackets, followed by an underscore. Citation keys cannot be all digits. The source document can be output with formatted citation references substituted. In this case, the reference list is added to the end of the file.

• biblabel.py

Creates unique keys for entries bibtex database(s). default keys look like Schwilk+Isaac:2006 or Smith+Johnson+etal:1999 Command line options allow you to change the default behavior.

• bibsearch.py

Search through a bibtex database for entries by key or by regular expression. Results can be output as a (minimally) formatted reference, a full bibtex entry, or by key. Note that bibsearch always takes a database by name (-f option or first argument) standard input is used for search terms.

• bibname.py

Create list of author/editor names for a bibtex database. Options allow you to specify a name template. See the module documentation for details.

• isbn2bib.py

Convert ISBN number to BibTeX entry.

• jabbrev.py

Replaces all journal names in a bibtex file with alternative names (abbreviations). The abbreviation file should be in the format: ABBREVIATION = LONG_NAME (see /examples/journal_names.txt). I've also provides a short script in the /examples directory that will take the list of journal abbreviations at http://www.csa.com/htbin/sjldisp.cgi?filename=/wais/data/srcjnl/biologset and produce a format readable by jabbrev.py

• reflist.py

Creates a list of keys from a latex .bbl file. This tool simply extracts reference keys from the bbl file. This is useful for creating a bibtex database limited to those references which occur only in a single latex file.

example: reflist.py my_doc.bbl | bibsearch.py -l my_db.bib > new_db.bib

Modules

• Package: bibstuff

Contains classes for interacting with .bib files and bibtex entries

• Package: bibstuff/bibstyles

Contains classes for creating reference styles