tidybib

A BibTeX formatter, written in Python

The tidybib command takes BibTeX input files and reformats their contents. There is no configuration; everyone gets the same boring output.

Installation

Install tidybib with pip:

pip install tidybib

Alternatively, you can run tidybib using pipx without installation:

pipx run tidybib

Usage

Run tidybib on BibTex files main.bib and aux.bib:

tidybib main.bib aux.bib

After the command has run, the contents of main.bib and aux.bib have been reformatted in place. Copies of the original files are kept under main.bib.untidy and aux.bib.untidy -- these will be overwritten the next time tidybib runs on changed input files.

You can also run tidybib on standard input:

cat main.bib aux.bib | tidybib

This will produce the formatted contents on standard output, and no files are changed.

Pre-commit hook

This repository contains a pre-commit hook to automatically run tidybib when committing BibTeX files with git. To use the hook, add this to the repos list in your .pre-commit-config.yaml file:

- repo: https://github.com/ntessore/tidybib
  rev: v0.1.3
  hooks:
    - id: tidybib

Acknowledgements

All of the hard work of extracting a grammar and parser from the BibTeX source code was done by aclements/biblib.