Searching BiBTeX

Meshach has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a file of BibTeX entries. Each one looks something like this:

 @ARTICLE{klitzing:nobel,
    AUTHOR="Klaus von Klitzing",
    TITLE="The Quantized Hall Effect",
    JOURNAL=RMP,
    VOLUME=58,
    PAGES=519,
    YEAR=1986
 }
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I need to run a search on the entries that will result in all the compleate entries matching the paramaters being in their own file. I know how to use files and grep, what I was wondering was what the best way of finding out what entry you're in is.

The problem with grep is that it just returns the matching line, which doesn't do me much good at all.

I could store each entry in an array and search it, but that seems very wasteful, so I'm trying to avoid that aproach.

Thanks in advance.
Good day, Meshach

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Re: Searching BiBTeX by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jul 22, 2002 at 16:32 UTC
If each entry is just like this, that is, terminated with `\n}\n`, you could just set `$/` to `\n}\n`, read in the records one by one and print if there's a match. If the BiBTeX file is a bit more of a mess, you will have to parse the file. Text::Balanced might help you, or Parse::RecDescent, depending on how exactly the file looks like. Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Searching BiBTeX by arturo (Vicar) on Jul 22, 2002 at 20:15 UTC
What you seek appears to be available in Text::BibTeX ... darn I love CPAN =) I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche	[reply]