Tuesday, April 6, 2010

BBL to BIB with BibDesk

BibDesk manages my bibliography, just like iTunes manages my music. I have a single iTunes library, and I also have only a single master bibliography. However, when writing a paper, I want to create a new bib file with only the publications cited in the paper. BibTeX nicely creates a bibliographic reference file (*.bbl), but I want a bibliography file (*.bib) in order to be able to open the paper related publications with BibDesk. So, what I needed was a tool to convert the bbl file into a bib file. Fortunately, I found everything for that on my machine: AppleScript, grep, sed and, of course, BibDesk. I wrote a small script which simply creates a new bib file using a source bib file and a selected bbl file. Simply install the script listed below to your script folder (~/Library/Scripts) and name it "Create BIB from BBL.scpt" . Open your master bib file with BibDesk, then select a bbl file and activate the script(from the script menu in the menu bar). It will automatically create a new bib file in the folder of the bbl file, with the same name as the original bbl file (but with the extension bib).
-- Creates a new bib-file from an bbl-file using BibDesk -- (C) 2010 Jens von Pilgrim -- Version: 1.1, 20100615 tell application "Finder" set selectedItems to the selection end tell if ((count of selectedItems) = 0) then display dialog "Please select at least one bbl file" buttons {"OK"} return end if -- retrieve master bib file set sourceDoc to "" tell application "BibDesk" if (count of documents) = 0 then display dialog "Please open the source bibliography with BibDesk" buttons {"OK"} return end if if (count of documents) > 1 then set listOfNames to {} as list repeat with doc in documents set listOfNames to listOfNames & name of doc end repeat set selected to (choose from list listOfNames) as string repeat with i from 1 to the count of documents set doc to (item i of documents) set strDocName to name of doc as string if (strDocName is equal to selected) then set sourceDoc to document i log "source doc set" end if end repeat if sourceDoc is equal to "" then return end if else set sourceDoc to document 1 end if end tell -- log "copy items from master bib file" -- convert all selected bbl files repeat with theItem in selectedItems set theFile to theItem as alias set posixpath to POSIX path of theFile if (offset of ".bbl" in posixpath) > 0 then set destPosixpath to (my rename(posixpath, "bbl", "bib")) set destFile to POSIX file destPosixpath tell application "Finder" if (exists destFile) then set rep to display dialog "File " & destFile & " already exists. Overwrite?" buttons {"Yes", "No"} set skip to (button returned of rep = "No") else set skip to false end if end tell if (not skip) then -- log "examine bbl file " & quoted form of posixpath -- actually, this is the most important line: set allCites to do shell script "grep -E \"\\\\\\\\bibitem[:space:]*(\\[[^]]*\\])?[:space:]*{([^}]*)}\" " & (quoted form of posixpath) & " | sed -E \"s/\\\\\\\\bibitem[:space:]*(\\[[^]]*\\])?[:space:]*{([^}]*)}/\\2/\"" set numberOfItems to length of paragraphs of allCites if numberOfItems = 0 then display dialog "No bibitems found in " & posixpath & ", maybe the file does not contain any bibitems or the search pattern does not recognize your file format." buttons {"Too bad."} else set numberOfMissedItems to 0 set missedItems to "" tell application "BibDesk" set destDoc to make new document repeat with cite in paragraphs of allCites set bibs to search sourceDoc for cite set bFound to false repeat with bib in bibs set strFoundKey to cite key of bib as string set strCite to cite as string if strFoundKey is equal to strCite then -- log strCite & " found, add to new bib" set newBib to make new publication at end of publications of destDoc duplicate bib to newBib set bFound to true end if end repeat if not bFound then set numberOfMissedItems to numberOfMissedItems + 1 if (numberOfMissedItems > 1) then set missedItems to missedItems & ", " end if set missedItems to missedItems & cite end if end repeat save destDoc in destFile end tell if numberOfMissedItems > 0 then display dialog "Did not found " & numberOfMissedItems & " out of " & numberOfItems & " items: " & missedItems & "." buttons {"Uups"} end if end if end if else display dialog "Can only extract bib entries from BBL file, was " & posixpath end if end repeat -- this sub-routine just comes up with the new name on rename(item_name, item_ext, new_extension) set the trimmed_name to text 1 thru -((length of item_ext) + 2) of the item_name set target_name to (the trimmed_name & "." & new_extension) as string return the target_name end rename
If you don't have BibDesk, you might want to have a look at Michael Zhang's Perl Script. Instead of parsing the bbl file, Zhang's script parses the latex source. I prefer parsing the bbl file, as sometimes I use a whole bunch of latex sources, and BibTeX is quite good in gathering all citations into a single bbl file. You may also want to read the comments to Zhang's post for other solutions. If you don't have a master bib file, you may look at http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=makebib. There's a perl scrip provided reconstructing a bib file from a bbl file only. Update 2010-06-15: I updated the script as some BBL files were not recognized. If the script doesn't work, you may have a look at your BBL file. At the moment, the script searches for bibitems like "\bibitem{key}" or "\bibitem[abbr]{key}".

8 comments:

Unknown said...

"Open your master bib file with BibDesk, then select a bbl file and activate the script"

I saw the script on the menu, but
was unable to follow the above instruction and make the script work.

Any more detailed instruction?

Jens v.P. said...

Yin, I have updated the script. The previous version did only recognize BBL files with bibitems using optional parameters, such as \bibitem[abbr]{key}. I have improved the search expression in order to support bibitems without the optional parameter, such as \bibitem{key}. I also added some info dialogs in case something goes wrong.

Did you succeed in at least creating an empty bib file? Note that you have to install the script into your user's script folder, not in the BibDesk script folder (as the script calls BibDesk, but it uses the current Finder's selection!).

Daniel said...

Hi
Could you modify it so that it looks in more than one master .bib file?
Cheers and thanks for sharing

Jens v.P. said...

@Daniel: Well, I'd figure one would have to add a loop around the search algorithm. That is, after line
86 (you will have to copy the code to an editor with line numbers) add a repeat statement, iterating over the list of all opened (master) bibliographies (and break when bFound is true), the end of this loop would be before line 96. Of course, one would have to replace "sourceDoc", computed in lines 22 to 41 with a list.

Cheers,
Jens

ElmerCat said...

An incredibly useful script and an excellent example for others to learn and build upon. One of the advantages of using BibDesk is that it works so perfectly with AppleScript; using the two together, you can do anything you want with the database. Thank you so much for sharing!

Anonymous said...

Very, very useful... but it died on me recently. It used to work but now, I get a complaint that there are no items or it does not recognize them. I am pretty sure that no journal is waiting for my >2000 articles/books master bib file, so I wonder if you could track down what happens. I do have the obnoxious "Web of science" {{ and }} problem, but that would seem odd as trouble source.
Here is an example bbl file:
\providecommand*{\mcitethebibliography}{\thebibliography}
\csname @ifundefined\endcsname{endmcitethebibliography}
{\let\endmcitethebibliography\endthebibliography}{}
\begin{mcitethebibliography}{1}
\providecommand*{\natexlab}[1]{#1}
\providecommand*{\mciteSetBstSublistMode}[1]{}
\providecommand*{\mciteSetBstMaxWidthForm}[2]{}
\providecommand*{\mciteBstWouldAddEndPuncttrue}
{\def\EndOfBibitem{\unskip.}
\providecommand*{\mciteBstWouldAddEndPunctfalse}
{\let\EndOfBibitem\relax}
\providecommand*{\mciteSetBstMidEndSepPunct}[3]{}
\providecommand*{\mciteSetBstSublistLabelBeginEnd}[3]{}
\providecommand*{\EndOfBibitem}{}
\mciteSetBstSublistMode{f}
\mciteSetBstMaxWidthForm{subitem}
{(\emph{\alph{mcitesubitemcount})}
\mciteSetBstSublistLabelBeginEnd{\mcitemaxwidthsubitemform\space}
{\relax}{\relax}

\bibitem[MORTIER \emph{et~al.}({1985})MORTIER, VANGENECHTEN, and
GASTEIGER]{MORTIER_1985}
W.~MORTIER, K.~VANGENECHTEN and J.~GASTEIGER, \emph{JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN
CHEMICAL SOCIETY}, {1985}, \textbf{107}, {829--835}\relax
\mciteBstWouldAddEndPuncttrue
\mciteSetBstMidEndSepPunct{\mcitedefaultmidpunct}
{\mcitedefaultendpunct}{\mcitedefaultseppunct}\relax
\EndOfBibitem
\end{mcitethebibliography}

I would appreciate it if you could have a look!

Patrick Bultinck
Ghent University

Ebbinghaus said...

Hiya,

I hate feeling like a helpless newbie but in the world of Applescripting I guess I am.

With my .bbl file selected in the finder and my BibDesk file open, when I run the script (from the script icon in the menu bar) I get this message:

"No bibitems found in /Users/GrayMatter/. . ./NSF-CHS-sctn00.bbl, maybe the file does not contain any bibitems or the search pattern does not recognize your file format."

I am using "apa" format and that is showing up before my entries at:

\refsection{0}
\sortlist{entry}{apa}

Any ideas? Thanks.

Jens v.P. said...

@Ebbinghaus I never tried that apa format. Have you tried another format?