Version history

Version 0.19

(released on October 26, 2015)

  • Added Markdown output format (contributed by Jorrit Wronski).
  • Incorrectly formatted author and editor names now result in warnings instead of errors, unless --strict mode is enabled.
  • Fixed HTML escaping.
  • Fixed parsing nested .aux files.
  • Fixed splitting names separated by non-lowercase " and ".
  • Fixed line numbers in error messages when parsing strings with DOS/Windows line breaks.
  • Fixed compatibility with BibTeX when parsing certain weird “von” names.
  • Removed excessive trailing newline from .bib output.
  • Text wrapping now works exactly as in BibTeX.
  • Added new API for reading and writing bibliography data.
  • Pythonic styles: reworked and extended the rich text API.
  • Pythonic styles: added strong, i, b, tt tags, renamed the old emph tag to em.
  • Pythonic styles: the author_year_title style now returns "" instead of None (fixes unorderable types error in Python 3).
  • Ported the documentation to Sphinx.

Thanks to Jorrit Wronski and Matthias Troffaes for their fixes and improvements!

Version 0.18

(released on July 6, 2014)

  • Pybtex is now fully case-insensitive (like BibTeX). As a consequence, IEEEtran styles now work correctly.

  • Added --preserve-case option to pybtex-convert (default behavior is to converted all identifiers to lower case).

  • An error is reported if two citations have the same key but different case, like in BibTeX. (Example: ddt1999 and DDT1999).

  • Fixed parsing unused bibliography entries with strings containing @ characters.

  • entry.max$ constant is now set to 250, global.max$ is set to 20000, like in BibTeX.

  • Added --strict option to pybtex-convert and pybtex-format (turns warning into errors).

  • Strict mode is now enabled by default when using pybtex as a library (exceptions are raised on all errors instead of just printing warnings to stderr).

    Non-strict error handling is still enabled when using pybtex from the command line, for compatibility with BibTeX. Use --strict option if you don’t like this.

  • Added missing pybtex-format manpage.

Version 0.17

(released on March 10, 2014)

  • Added pybtex-format utility for formatting bibliography files as HTML, LaTeX, and other supported human-readable formats.
  • Added --strict command line option to pybtex (all warnings become errors).
  • Added alpha label style, and alpha and unsrtalpha formatting styles.
  • Added support for url, eprint, doi, and pubmed fields in unsrt style.
  • Names with hyphens are now abbreviated correctly (“Jean-Baptiste” becomes “J.-B.”).
  • width$ now uses cmr10 font metrics, like in BibTeX. Non-latin characters are also supported.
  • Pythonic style engine now supports @preamble commands.
  • Warning on missing fields are now more human-readable.
  • When writing BibTeX files, put entry key on the same line with entry type. Fixes warnings in Jabref.
  • When using multiple .bib files, macros defined in earlier files are available in subsequent ones (like in BibTeX).
  • Fixed parsing .bst files with lines consisting of a single % character.
  • Fixed sorting entries without author in author_year_title sorting style.
  • Fixed broken CaseInsensitiveDict.get().
  • CaseInsensitiveDict is now pickleable.
  • Added support for registering plugins at runtime with pybtex.plugin.register_plugin() - useful for using pybtex as a library.

Many thanks to Matthias C. M. Troffaes for his numerous fixes and improvements!

Version 0.16

(released on March 17, 2012)

  • BibTeX .bib and .bst parsers were completely rewritten. They are now much faster and more BibTeX-compatible.
  • Syntax errors and undefined strings in .bib files now result in warnings instead of errors, like in BibTeX.
  • Unused entries in .bib files are now skipped, like in BibTeX.
  • The case of entry keys is now preserved (in previous versions they were converted to lowercase).
  • Pythonic style engine now supports sorting.
  • Pythonic style engine: fixed nested optional() blocks.
  • Fixed parsing of some names with a Last part but no von part.
  • Fixed processing of brace-level-one “special characters” in purify$ BibTeX built-in function.
  • Added proper error messages on encoding errors in .bib files.
  • The default encoding is now UTF-8 on all platforms.
  • pybtex-convert now preserves the order of entries in BibTeX and BibTeXML files.

The following changes were contributed by Matthias C. M. Troffaes:

  • Fixed first_of behavior when non-empty child is followed by a child that has a missing field.
  • Fixed crossref lookups when key is not lower case.
  • Completed unsrt and plain python styles: they now contain all entry types.
  • Added doctree backend for rendering into a tree of docutils nodes.
  • Added support for non-string backends.

Version 0.15

(released on February 1, 2011)

  • Changed license from GPL-3 to MIT.
  • Added support for setuptools plugins.
  • BibTeX parser: fixed whitespace normalization in concatenated strings.
  • BibTeX parser: when parsing multiple BibTeX files, macros defined in earlier files are now available to all subsequent files, like in BibTeX.
  • BibTeX .bst interpreter now prints warnings on missing entries, like BibTeX, instead of raising a KeyError.
  • call.type$ BibTeX built-in function now uses default.entry for unknown entry types, like in BibTeX.
  • substring$ now accepts start=0 and returns an empty string.
  • change.case$: fixed incorrect formatting of strings starting with special characters with "t" format.
  • Fixed abbreviation of names starting with special characters or non-alphabetic characters.
  • Fixed incorrect entry order and duplicated entries with \nocite{*}.
  • Added more detailed error messages for already defined variables in .bst files.

Version 0.14.1

(released on September 30, 2010)

  • Added missing custom_fixers directory to the tarball — needed only for converting the sources to Python 3.

Version 0.14

(released on September 20, 2010)

  • BibTeX writer: fixed quoting " (double quote) characters.
  • BibTeX parser now produces human-readable error messages on unread macros.
  • Added error messages on missing data in .aux files.
  • Improved performance on very long name lists.
  • Added support for Python 3.

Version 0.13.2

(released on February 26, 2010)

  • BibTeX parser: fixed a bug with parsing strings containing braces, like "Error in {DNA}".

Version 0.13.1

(released on February 18, 2010)

  • Fixed ImportError: No module named kpathsea errors. One of the source files was missing from pybtex-0.13.tar.bz2 for some strange reason. Sorry about that. ;)

Version 0.13

(released on February 14, 2010)

  • Implemented --min-crossrefs option.
  • All command line options of the original BibTeX are not supported.
  • Pybtex now respects BSTINPUTS, BIBINPUTS and TEXMFOUTPUT environment variables.
  • BibTeX bibliography parser now strips excessive whitespace from fields, like BibTeX does.

Version 0.12

(released on November 21, 2009)

  • Pybtex now works correctly with \input{filename} in LaTeX files.
  • Added a proper change.case$ BibTeX function instead of a stub.
  • Added -e/--encoding command line option.
  • Fixed non-working --bibtex-encoding option.
  • Added proper error messages on missing plugins, file IO errors, some BibTeX interpreter errors, etc.
  • Fallback to backslash-encoding when printing messages to the console - to make them printable regardless of the locale.

Version 0.11

(released on September 7, 2009)

  • Made text.lentgh$ and text.prefix$ BibTeX built-in functions treat braces and TeX special characters properly (like the original BibTeX functions do).
  • Changed purify$ to replace ties and hyphens by spaces.
  • Fixed a bug in substring$ with negative start values.
  • Fixed .bst file grammar to allow underscores in identifiers.
  • BibTeX name parser: ties are now treated as whitespace when splitting name parts.
  • Implemented BibTeX-like text wrapping. The resulting .bbl output should now be byte-for-byte identical to that of BibTeX in most cases.

Version 0.10

(released on August 24, 2009)

  • Added support for multiple bibliography databases.
  • Pythonic bibliography formatter: added helper functions to simplify writing BibTeX-like name formatting styles in Python. Added a tool for automatic conversion of BibTeX {ll}{, ff}-like patterns into Python.
  • BibTeX parser: added missing characters to the caracter set of the valid identifiers.
  • BibTeX parser: a comma is now allowed between the last field and the closing brace.
  • BibTeX name parser: when splitting name parts into words, whitespace at brace level > 0 is now ignored.
  • BibTeX name parser: fixed parsing of single-word lowercase names and complex von names, like in “Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen”.
  • Fixed broken --label-style and --name-style options.
  • Added (autogenerated) manpages.
  • Added this changelog.

Version 0.9

(released on August 17, 2009)

  • Implemented \citation{*}.
  • Implemented crossrefs.
  • BibTeX .bib parser now supports newlines inside strings.
  • Fixed: .bib filename from .aux file was ignored.
  • Fixed incorrect argument passing to codecs.open().
  • Fixed incorrect whitespace handling in the name parsing code.

Version 20090402

(released on February 04, 2009)

  • Fixed yet more encoding-related bugs.
  • Cleaned up some old nasty code, updated the documentation, added more tests.

Version 20080918

(released on September 18, 2008)

  • Added HTML backend. The pythonic bibliography formatter can now produce LaTeX, HTML, and plaintext.
  • BibTeXML writer now indents the resulting XML.
  • Removed the dependency on external elementtree.
  • Improved the interface of the pybtex-convert script. It is just convert foo.bib foo.yaml now.
  • Fixed several bugs in the BibTeX interpreter.
  • Fixed several encoding-related bugs.

Version 20070513

(released on May 13, 2007)

  • Added an interpreter for the BibTeX stack language. Pybtex now supports BibTeX style files.
  • Added a YAML bibliography format (both input and output).
  • Improved processing of names with {braces}.
  • Added support for @preamble to both BibTeX parser and writer.
  • Introduced an experimental pythonic template language to make bibliography formatting easier with a more functional-oriented approach.
  • Added support for incollection entries to the experimentl pythonic bibliography style.
  • cElementTree is now used for BibTeXML parsing, if present.
  • Added some documentation files (finally).

Version 20060416

(released on April 16, 2006)

  • Added BibTeX and BibTeXML formatters for bibliography databases. Added a database conversion tool.
  • Improved name splitting in the BibTeX parser.
  • Locale encoding is now used by default.
  • Added richtext.Check class to simplify formatting of optional bibliography fields.
  • Added support for booklet and inbook entry types to the experimentl pythonic bibliography style.

Version 20060402

(released on April 2, 2006)

  • Added initial Unicode support and input/output encodings.
  • Introduced output backends to make bibliography styles markup-independent. Added LaTeX and Plaintext backends.
  • Improved BibTeXML parser, add support for pre-parsed names (<bibtex:first>, <bibtex:middle> and so on).
  • Added default macros for month names to the BibTeX parser.
  • Added an experimental richtext.Phrase (former Pack class (former Packer class)) class to make creating sentences and delimited lists easier.
  • Added experimental support for pluggable name and label styles to the pythonic bibliogrphy formatter.
  • Made Pybtex work on Windows by renaming aux.py to auxfile.py. Duh.

Version 0.1

(released on March 4, 2006)

Initial release. This version already has a basic BibTeX .bib parser, BibTeXML parser and a proof-of-concept pythonic bibliography formatter.