Support for biber? about rdpack HOT 5 CLOSED

Thanks for the praise. Note that there is no need to be apologetic, requests for features, bug reports, critique, etc. are always welcome. They may or may not be followed up, of course.

Regarding support for biblatex/biber, can you post here examples of offending bib entries? Or even better, make a pull request at https://github.com/GeoBosh/reprexes (just add a bib file in the top directory of reprexes and create a pull request).

Full support is not feasible but, in general, if the entries are parsed by bibtex, then it is a matter of adding support for them in Rdpack. This depends mostly on demand/requests.

from rdpack.

Thanks. I uploaded (I think; git is quite new to me) an extremely simple example with three entries - the incompatibilities for those being have a "date" field rather than separate "year" and "month" fields, and "journaltitle" rather than "journal". Changing those (i.e., using "year" and "month" as well as "journal") instead fixed the issue.

Moving back to "pure" bibtex is not a big problem, so the fact my own database now is in biblatex/biber-format is not going to stop me from using Rdpack. But the ability to use biblatex-format entries would be useful.

from rdpack.

Thanks, I will have a look.

from rdpack.

After some thought, I have come to think that it is best, at least for now, to leave to the users the conversion of biblatex bib files to bibtex ones. There would be a substantial maintenance overhead and additional complexity if the citation macros were to do this on the fly.

Having said that, I don't rule out a cardinal solution in the future if a suitable off-the-shelf parser is available. Prompted by your question, I ported the excellent bibutils library to an R package, rbibutils. In the initial version it just converts from biblatex to bibtex, see examples for rbibutils::bibConvert() there if you don't have suitable routine for conversion.

For completeness, I will add that bibutils binaries are avaliable for linux distributions and a conversion from biblatex to bibtex can be done with something like

biblatex2xml mybiblatexfiile.bib | xml2bib > my.bib

The bibutils programs can also be compiled on most systems (including MSYS on Windows) by just following the instructions in its distribution, e.g. bibutils on CTAN.

from rdpack.

This sounds more than reasonable. The tips about bibutils are highly useful! I used to use bibtool a lot but moving to biblatex changed that a lot. I then used biber quite a bit rather than learning to use other tools, so this was very helpful. On the usage front, I simply re-coded by databases by hand. Nice tool, once again thanks for it, and thanks for making yet another R package!

from rdpack.