regular expressions

Anon

Hi Everyone,
I've got an input file - a bibtex data file which is composed of a series of entries e.g.

@Article{Higham:SIAM-NEWS-27-1-10,
author = "Nicholas J. Higham",
pages = "10, 11, 19",
month = "January"
}

@Book{Knuth:ct-a,
author = "Donald E. Knuth",
title = "The {\TeX}book",
}

there can be any number of such entries, (and a whole lot more of other types eg @Booklet etc etc.

does anyone know how to write a regular expression that would recognise a series of one type of entries, like the @Article and return everything from the @Article{ to the closing }?
Does anyone know any other way something ike this can be done?

Cheers,
Rob.

khaine

You could just explode the string on the @.

Mark.

Anon

umm I don't actually know what that means - I'm new at this so take it easy (o:

In any case what would happen if the "@ appeared within one of the @Article segments?

Thanks for your reply,
Rob.

khaine

the @ appearing in the article could be a problem. However if you do want to use explode all you would do is

$lines=explode("@", $bibtexdata);

so if you supplied

@Article{Higham:SIAM-NEWS-27-1-10,
author = "Nicholas J. Higham",
pages = "10, 11, 19",
month = "January"
}

@Book{Knuth:ct-a,
author = "Donald E. Knuth",
title = "The {\TeX}book",
}

then you would end up with an array like

$lines[0]='Article{Higham:SIAM-NEWS-27-1-10, author = "Nicholas J. Higham", pages = "10, 11, 19", month = "January"';
}
$lines[1]='Book{Knuth:ct-a, author = "Donald E. Knuth", title = "The {\TeX}book", }';

If the '@' is essential you can just addit back on later.

Mark.

Anon

Great, thanks mate - I'll give it a whirl and see what happens. Sure it can only work - or not.

Cheers,
Rob

(and if anyone has any other ideas sure I'd still like to hear them!)