If no bibliography files are specified on the command line, then stdin is read instead, so that bibextract can be used in a UNIX pipeline.
The order of entries, and spacing within ``@Name{...}'' text, is preserved exactly. Successive entries are separated by a single blank line.
The first regular-expression pattern, keyword-regexp, is used to select which ``keyword = "value"'' pairs to examine further; it matches against the keyword part only. It may include alternate keywords separated by vertical bar, such as "author|editor". If it is an empty string, then the entire bibliographic entry text, including the entry type name, is examined.
The second regular-expression pattern, value-regexp, is used to further select from the value strings of ``keyword = "value"'' pairs the bibliography entries to be output. It too may contain alternates separated by vertical bar, such as "brown|smith". The selection algorithm therefore consists of the logical AND of match successes against the keyword and value strings.
Letter case is ignored in regular-expression matches, so that "Brown|Smith", "BROWN|smith", and "brown|smith" are equivalent. The original letter case of the output entries is always preserved.
If the input BibTeX data comes from files named on the command line, each output entry will contain a final key/value pair of the form:
bibsource = "file://hostname/FILENAME",The value string is a World-Wide Web Uniform Resource Locator, where FILENAME is the full path name of the source file in which the entry was found. Such lines are silently ignored by standard BibTeX styles, so they are harmless, but they help to track the origin of bibliography entries.
If you don't want the bibsource lines to be added, simply supply the BibTeX file from stdin.
bibextract can be used to extract from a large BibTeX bibliography data base just those bibliography entries that match a particular pair of regular expressions.
Extract all entries mentioning chaos in any field:
bibextract "" "chaos" bibfile(s) >new-bibtex-file"
Extract entries with names Brown or Smith occurring in either of the author or editor fields:
bibextract "author|editor" "brown|smith" bibfile(s) >new-bibtex-file
Extract entries for titles containing the letter `z' anywhere after a vowel; note that single quotes are necessary to provide the necessary protection from shell expansion:
bibextract "title" '[aeiou].*z' bibfile(s) >new-bibtex-file
Extract all conference proceedings entries:
bibextract "" '@proceedings' bibfile(s) >new-bibtex-file
That feature should be added.
Nelson H. F. Beebe, Ph.D. Center for Scientific Computing Department of Mathematics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA Tel: +1 801 581 5254 FAX: +1 801 581 4148 Email: <beebe@math.utah.edu>