Converting Bibitem into Bibtex Entry with Perl

[monkfan]

Hi,
Do you guys happen to know if there is existing Perl implementation for converting BIBITEM entry like this:

\bibitem[Ao {\it et~al}., 2004]{AGKM04} Ao, W. {\it et~al.} (2001) Som
+e long title 1, {\it Science}, {\bf 305}, 1743-1746.

\bibitem[Bailey and Elkan, 1995]{BE95} Bailey, T.  Elkan, C. (1995)  S
+ome long title 2 {\it Machine Learning}, {\bf 21}, 51-80.

Into BIBTEX entry like this:

@article{AGKM04,
    author  = {Ao, W and \ {\it et~al.}},
    title   = {Some long title 1},
    journal = {Science},
    year  = {2004},
    volume= {305},
    pages = {1743-1746},
}
@article{BE95,
    author  = {Bailey, T and  Elkan, C.},
    title   = {Some long title 2},
    journal = {Machine Learning},
    year  = {1995},
    volume= {21},
    pages = {51-80},
}

[andreas1234567]

Perhaps Text::BibTeX could be useful?

Update:Try the Tex2bib script on this site.

Read more... (2 kB)

[Corion]

What have you tried so far? I'd simply parse out the information with a regular expression (untested):

use strict;

for my $item (<DATA>) {
    chomp $item;
    if ($item !~ /^\\bibitem\[.*?\]   # skip the command and optional 
+argument
                   \{([A-Z\d]+)\]     # extract the bibliography item,
+ all caps letters
                   \s*(.*?)           # extract the author list
                   \((\d{4})\)        # extract the year
                   (.*?)              # extract the publication title
                   \{\\it\s(.*?)\},   # extract the category
                   \s*\{\\bf\s(\d+)\},# extract the volume
                   \s*(\d+-\d+)       # extract the page numbers
                   \.                 # a dot at the end
                 /x) {
        print "%% Ignoring weird bibliography item: >$item<\n";
        next;
    };
    printf <<'TEX',$1,$2,$3,...
@article{%s,
    ...
TEX
};
__DATA__
\bibitem[Ao {\it et~al}., 2004]{AGKM04} Ao, W. {\it et~al.} (2001) Som
+e long title 1, {\it Science}, {\bf 305}, 1743-1746.
\bibitem[Bailey and Elkan, 1995]{BE95} Bailey, T. Elkan, C. (1995) Som
+e long title 2 {\it Machine Learning}, {\bf 21}, 51-80.