[texhax] For bibitem

[John Palmer]

pdv204 at lehigh.edu:
> > Is there a tool I can use to convert these citations to the normal
> > bibtex format like.

Reinhard Kotucha: 
> It's nearly impossible to write a program which can understand the
> \bibitems.  It is possible if all the \bibitems use ***exactly*** the
> same format.  I doubt that this is the case.
 
I think one could do it with a perl program of a few dozen lines, even if
the format of the bibitems varies a little, as perl has excellent
functions for matching text with regular expressions.  I recently
converted a list of 600 references from html to bibtex by this method.  
You would probably need to make some individual adjustments afterwards
with an editor, but the perl program would have done the repetitive work
for you.

However this may not be useful advice unless you have some acquaintance
with perl (or its forerunners, sed awk etc).  You may want to give it a
go, though, as perl is very useful to know.

-- 
John Palmer
Preston near Weymouth, Dorset, England
e-mail:  johnp at bcs.org.uk (plain text preferred)
website: http://www.palmyra.uklinux.net/