Re: [Ebib-users] Ebib 1.5.2 released; git repository

[Thomas A. S. <tho...@un...>]

Hi Joost,

thanks for your incredibly fast reaction - this is just great!

On Nov 3, 2007, at 12:05 PM, Joost Kremers wrote:

> hi thomas,
>
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 06:21:38PM +0100, Joost Kremers wrote:
> [unbalanced parentheses in field values]
>> what i *should* have done is to make ebib not choke on unbalanced
>> parentheses. the simplest way to do that is to tell ebib that ()  
>> are not to
>> be considered parentheses at all.
>>
>> unfortunately, bibtex itself makes this simple solution unnecessarily
>> difficult, because it actually *allows* braces to be used to  
>> enclose an
>> entry. that is, this:
>>
>> @article(key,
>>  ...
>> )
>>
>> is equivalent to:
>>
>> @article{key,
>>  ...
>> }
>>
>> but there is probably a way to work around that. with a bit of  
>> luck, i'll
>> have something put together in a few days. i'll let you know when i  
>> do.
>
> well, i've looked at it, and working around this problem isn't so  
> easy as i
> had hoped. i have a fix that allows you to use unbalanced  
> parentheses in
> field values, but it breaks the ability to use parentheses as entry
> delimiter.
>
> so, for that reason, i'm not adding this code to the master branch for
> now. but i've added it to the devel branch (ATM, the difference  
> between
> master and devel is *only* this code), so that you at least have a  
> way to
> load your .bib files, provided you use braces {} to delimit entries.
>
> if you have git installed, you can get the code here:
> <http://repo.or.cz/w/ebib.git> (make sure to check out the devel  
> branch, of
> course.) if you don't have git, just let me know, i can send you the  
> source
> privately.
>

Sigh... I can see why BibTeX syntax must be giving you headaches. I  
knew that you could use either braces or quotation marks as  
delimiters, I had no idea that parentheses are possible as well. In  
which case it is of course quite difficult for you to make a  
universally valid parser. I don't have that much experience with  
BibTex databases, but am just wondering how many people actually use  
parentheses for this purpose?


> i haven't looked at error reporting at all yet. from the looks of  
> it, this
> parentheses problem cannot be solved within the existing code, so i  
> think
> my energy is better spent working on a reimplementation of the .bib- 
> file
> parsing code rather than continue to modify the existing code...
>
>
Well, maybe a good error-reporting tool would provide a solution. If  
ebib could provide something like "There are unbalanced parentheses in  
your file on lines X, XX, and XXX. Do you want to edit the file before  
I load it" and then load the file into a normal emacs buffer, that  
would help. In my case, I have such parentheses in the "annote"-field  
only, but of course, I could imagine that they may be found in titles  
as well (just think of the old-fashioned German way of haveing  
something like "1)" as a numbering system). So I would say disregard  
the problem; I'll just have to be careful to edit my files  
accordingly. I'll have a look at the other bibtex tools I use (such as  
pybliographer, jabref, and bibdesk); they never complained about the  
parentheses, so I assume that they disable parentheses as delimiters  
for bibtex by default.

I don't have git; could you send me the source file by mail? Thanks a  
lot!

All best

Thomas