BibTool Manual Introduction Interfacing BibTool with Other Programming Languages

Interfacing BibTool with Other Programming Languages

BibTool can be used as a means for other programming languages to access BibTeX data bases. In this course BibTool reads the BibTeX file and prints it in a normalized form which makes it easy for the host programming language to parse it and get the information about the entries and fields.

In addition BibTool can already preselect several entries or do other useful transformations before the host programming language even sees the contents. Thus it is fairly easy to write a CGI script (e.g. in Perl) which utilizes BibTool to extract certain entries from a BibTeX data base and presents the result on a HTML page.

Currently the distribution of BibTool contains frames of programs in Perl and Tcl which can be used as a basis for further develpoments.

I am working towards making BibTool a linkable library of C code. As one step into this direction the exported functions and header information has been documented. This documentation is contained in the distribution.

A tight integration of BibTool into another programming language is possible. As an experiment into this direction I have choosen Tcl as the target language. The result is BibTcl which is contained in the distribution of BibTool.

BibTool Manual Introduction Interfacing BibTool with Other Programming Languages