Minimal bibtex io

Format according to "Tame the BeaST" by Nicolas Markey, Oct. 2009.

• @TYPE{citekey, key = {value}, ...}, This will be loaded as bib-entry of type TYPE
• @string{key = {value}, ...}
• @preamble{value}

Functions

loads

Loads the raw bytes of a bibtex-file into a dictionary and makes only minimal assumptions on the structrue but not on the content.

normalize

Takes the raw bib-dictionary and tries to decode and normalize it. All optionally. It strips away leading, trailing, and consecutive whitespaces. It converts all keys, entrytypes, and citekyes to lowercase. It decodes keys and/or values to ''ascii''.

dumps

Dumps a normalized (all ascii string) bib-dictionary into a bib-file-string.

Example

import minimal_bibtex_io as mbib

# Read bytes, make no assumptions on keys or encoding
with open("minimal_bibtex_io/tests/resources/example.bib", "rb") as f:
    rawbib = mbib.loads(f.read())

# Try to decode to ascii and set keys to lower case
bib = mbib.normalize(rawbib)

entry = {"type": "book", "citekey": "kasperle1887", "fields": {}}
entry["fields"]["title"] = "The hills are green"
entry["fields"]["year"] = 1887
entry["fields"]["whateverkeyiwant"] = "This is only relevant for me."
bib["entries"].append(entry)

# eventually ...
with open("my.bib", "wt") as f:
    f.write(mbib.dumps(bib, indent=4, width=79))