ppf-jabref 0.1.0

Python tools to work with JabRef libraries

ppf.jabref

ppf.jabref provides a python interface to JabRef SQL databases. It maps database relations to python classes using SQLAlchemy. Also, ppf.jabref provides tools to parse the data stored inside the database tables.

Using ppf.jabref

ppf.jabref relies on SQLAlchemy for database access. All that ppf.jabref adds to this is a data model which makes sqlalchemy understand how a JabRef database is structured (by providing classes Entry and Field).

A simple example that queries all entries and prints a selection of the fields looks like this:

    from sqlalchemy import create_engine
    from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
    from ppf.jabref import Entry, File

    engine = create_engine('<your connection string here>', echo=False)
    Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
    session = Session()

    q = session.query(Entry)
    for entry in q:
        print(entry.fields['author'], '\t',
            entry.fields['title'], '\t',
            entry.fields['year'], '\t', end='')

        files = File.from_string(entry.fields['file'])
        for i in range(len(files)):
            f = files[i]
            print(f.path, '\t', end='')

The first 6 lines are setup code to import required packages and to set up the database connection. The query then uses ppf.jabref's Entry class to obtain all Entries (=references) in the JabRef database. The for-loop shows how to access fields and uses the File class to find out where the documents linked to this entry are stored.