bibtex-js

Live demo in browser

Library for parsing BibTeX .bib files, based mostly on the excellent guide to BibTeX, Tame the BeaST.

Written in Typescript, compiled to ES5 Javascript (with typings provided).

This module literally just parses a BibTex file and processes it as far as BibTeX goes. It doesn't process TeX commands (i.e., {\"o} is not translated to ö). If you want to actually work with a bibliography, look for Bibliography.js.

Implementation

Not all internal BibTeX functions are implemented, simply because I don't need them personally. Most notably sorting entries is still an open issue because BibTeX has a little complicated algorithm which required a function that "purifies" field values, which for example makes {\ss} equivalent to ss but makes ä come after z. I am unsure if that is actually what anyone wants in modern days though. A modern approach would be to use Unicode collation and then sort.

Pull requests and issues are welcome.

Usage

import {parseBibFile} from "bibtex";

const bibFile = parseBibFile(`

@InProceedings{mut2011,
  author    = {Pradeep Muthukrishnan and Dragomir Radev and Qiaozhu Mei},
  title     = {Simultaneous Similarity Learning and Feature-Weight Learning for Document Clustering},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of TextGraphs-6: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2011},
  address   = {Portland, Oregon},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-1107},
  pages = {42--50}
}
`);

console.log(
    // Keys are case-insensitive
    bibFile.getEntry("MUT2011").getField("TITLE")
); // Prints some complicated string

License

MIT