Dear All, this is just to +1 this on my part as well. Although unadvertised, citeproc-org basically already supports CSL-JSON bibliographies, and it would be fantastic if other components of the Emacs citation/bibliography infrastructure also did. BTW, would CSL-JSON support in =parsebib= mean that there is hope for having CSL-support in Ebib too?
best regards, András On Fri, 7 May 2021 at 18:23, Titus von der Malsburg <malsb...@posteo.de> wrote: > > > On 2021-05-07 Fri 16:47, Joost Kremers wrote: > > On Fri, May 07 2021, Titus von der Malsburg wrote: > >>> Apparently, =json-parse-{buffer|string}= then gives you a symbol with a > >>> space > >>> in it... > >> > >> I now see that symbol names “can contain any characters whatever” [1]. But > >> many > >> characters need to be escaped (like spaces) which isn’t pretty. > > > > Agreed. But if you pass such a symbol to =symbol-name= or to =(format > > "%s")=, > > the escape character is removed, so when it comes to displaying those > > symbols to > > users, it shouldn't matter much. > > > > Note, though, that the keys in CSL-JSON don't seem to contain any spaces or > > other weird characters. There are just lower case a-z and dash, that's all. > > I agree that weird characters are unlikely going to be an issue. > Nonetheless, strings seem slightly more future-proof. Funky unicode stuff is > now appearing everywhere (I’ve seen emoji being used for variable names) and > the situation could be different a couple of years down the line. > > >>> This works for the Elisp library =json.el=, but Emacs 27 can be compiled > >>> with > >>> native JSON support, which, however, doesn't provide this option, > >>> unfortunately. > >> > >> I see. In this case it might make sense to propose string keys as a > >> feature for > >> json.c. The key is a string anyway at some point during parsing, so > >> avoiding the > >> conversion to symbol may actually be the best way to speed things up. > > > > True. I'll ask on emacs-devel. Personally, I'd prefer strings, too, but I'm > > a > > bit hesitant about doing the conversion myself, esp. given that in Ebib, > > all the > > keys would need to be converted back before I can save a file. > > Sure, converting all keys in parsebib is not attractive. > > >>> That would be easy to support, but IMHO is better handled in > >>> bibtex-completion: > >>> just parse the buffer and then call =gethash= on the resulting hash > >>> table. Or > >>> what use-case do you have in mind? > >> > >> One use case: bibtex-completion drops fields that aren’t needed early on > >> to save > >> memory and CPU cycles. (Some people work with truly enormous > >> bibliographies, > >> like crypto.bib with ~60K entries.) But this means that we sometimes have > >> to > >> read an individual entry again if we need more fields that were dropped > >> earlier. > >> In this case I’d like to be able to read just one entry without having to > >> reparse the complete bibliography. > > > > Makes sense. For .bib sources, this should be fairly easy to do. For .json, > > I > > can't really say how easy it would be. It's not difficult to find the entry > > key > > in the buffer, but from there you'd have to be able to find the start of the > > entry in order to parse it. Currently, I don't know how to do that. > > Not a big deal. Since it’s just about individual entries and the code isn’t > super central, we can easily hack something. > > >>>> - Functions for resolving strings and cross-references. > > [...] > >>> parsebib has a lower-level API and a higher-level API, and the latter does > >>> essentially what you suggest here. I thought bibtex-completion was already > >>> using it... > >> > >> Nope. I think the high-level API didn’t exist when I wrote my code in 2014. > > > > No, it didn't. I seem to remember, though, that you gave me the idea for the > > higher-level API, which is probably why I assumed you were using it. > > > > So that part of =parsebib= hasn't been tested much... (Ebib doesn't use it, > > either). If you do decide to start using it, please test it and report any > > issues you find. And let me know if I can help with testing. > > The organically grown parsing code in the Bibtex completion has been bugging > me for a while. So I'm keen on rewriting this. But I may not get to it > until the summer. I'll keep you posted when I start working on it. > > Titus > >