Re: CSL-JSON support for =parsebib=

[Joost Kremers]

Hi Titus,

On Fri, May 07 2021, Titus von der Malsburg wrote:
> I’m the maintainer of bibtex-completion, helm-bibtex, and ivy-bibtex. My name 
> is
> actually Titus, not Theo ;)

:$ (I do apologise!)

> Regarding the symbols vs. string issue: I don’t have a strong opinion, but
> personally tend to favor a conservative solution that avoids braking changes.
> First, it’s difficult to predict how switching to symbols is going to affect
> other software including custom code written by users. Second, JSON key names
> can contain spaces and other weird stuff.

Apparently, =json-parse-{buffer|string}= then gives you a symbol with a space 
in it...

> So strings are perhaps a more natural
> choice anyway. (It appears that you can actually configure the JSON parser to
> use strings instead of symbols. See variable `json-key-type`.)

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.

> Finally,
> it’s not necessarily clear that avoiding the conversion to strings saves
> sufficiently many CPU cycles to justify the effort.

I can simply try it out. Shouldn't be difficult to code up.

> Regarding support for CSL-JSON: bibtex-completion is currently very
> BibTeX-oriented and uses fairly low-level parsing functions from parsebib. We
> could add similar support for CSL-JSON

I'm afraid that won't be possible, because the CLS-JSON support in parsebib
isn't low-level. ;-) There's basically just a single function that gives you all
the entries in the buffer and that's it.

> Some rough ideas for such an API (just for illustration):
> - A function that returns all entries in a .bib or CSL-JSON file.

Those already exist... ;-) For JSON, that's basically the only option, because
the actual parsing isn't handled by parsebib. For BibTeX, such a function has
existed for some time now.

> - A function that returns an entry with a specific key (or multiple entries).

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?

> - Functions for resolving strings and cross-references.

This, too, is something that parsebib already does.

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...


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments