[open-bibliography] Bibtex parser in Python

[François Boulogne]

Hi,

I planned a long time ago to write an email as Peter asked me, but it
was delayed. Sorry for that.

Few months ago, I asked the permission to OKFN to reuse a part of the
code of a project to write a standalone bibtex parser in python.
In short, the OKFN project (bibserver) is under AGPL and we (users and
I) wanted to have something like LGPL.

So, the project is there: https://bibtexparser.readthedocs.org

I used OKFN project because it was the best bibtex parser I could find
in Python. Sounds odd, but no real library was available. Thus, I
decided to start this project.
My contribution is mainly to refactor the code, add unittest,
documentation and so on.

If I looked for a bibtex parser, it's because I like to write scripts to
facilitate the tasks I have to do every day. One of them is citebib:
http://citebib.readthedocs.org/
The idea: I have a large database with all papers I know and I want to
pick up some of them easily (to write emails, latex documents...).

I also tried different things to organize ideas around my bibliography.
How to highlight interesting information, gather them, put in relation
different papers... I tried docear a bit, the mind map concept is nice,
but it looks too complicated for me (too many features) and I also
appreciate CLI so the heavy GUI was a pain.
I'm currently using ikiwiki to organize my notes, but it's not ideal so
far to keep my ideas about bibliography (but i love it to record
experimental results, links....)

My hope is that libraries like bibtexparser can help other devs to make
their own tools.

Cheers,

-- 
François Boulogne.
http://www.sciunto.org
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