btparse::doc::bt_language(3)					      btparse					      btparse::doc::bt_language(3)

NAME

       bt_language - the BibTeX data language, as recognized by btparse

SYNOPSIS

	  # Lexical grammar, mode 1: top-level
	  AT			@
	  NEWLINE		

	  COMMENT		\%~[
]*

	  WHITESPACE		[ 
	]+
	  JUNK			~[@
 
	]+

	  # Lexical grammar, mode 2: in-entry
	  NEWLINE		

	  COMMENT		\%~[
]*

	  WHITESPACE		[ 
	]+
	  NUMBER		[0-9]+
	  NAME			[a-z0-9!$&*+-./:;<>?[]^\_`|]+
	  LBRACE		{
	  RBRACE		}
	  LPAREN		(
	  RPAREN		)
	  EQUALS		=
	  HASH			#
	  COMMA 		,
	  QUOTE 		"

	  # Lexical grammar, mode 3: strings
	  # (very hairy -- see text)

	  # Syntactic grammar:
	  bibfile : ( entry )*

	  entry : AT NAME body

	  body : STRING 		   # for comment entries
	       | ENTRY_OPEN contents ENTRY_CLOSE

	  contents : ( NAME | NUMBER ) COMMA fields   # for regular entries
		   | fields		   # for macro definition entries
		   | value		   # for preamble entries

	  fields : field { COMMA fields }
		 |

	  field : NAME EQUALS value

	  value : simple_value ( HASH simple_value )*

	  simple_value : STRING
		       | NUMBER
		       | NAME

DESCRIPTION

       One of the problems with BibTeX is that there is no formal specification of the language.  This means that users exploring the arcane
       corners of the language are largely on their own, and programmers implementing their own parsers are completely on their own---except for
       observing the behaviour of the original implementation.

       Other parser implementors (Nelson Beebe of "bibclean" fame, in particular) have taken the trouble to explain the language accepted by their
       parser, and in that spirit the following is presented.

       If you are unfamiliar with the arcana of regular and context-free languages, you will not have any easy time understanding this.  This is
       not an introduction to the BibTeX language; any LaTeX book would be more suitable for learning the data language itself.

LEXICAL GRAMMAR

       The lexical scanner has three distinct modes: top-level, in-entry, and string.  Roughly speaking, top-level is the initial mode; we enter
       in-entry mode on seeing an "@" at top-level; and on seeing the "}" or ")" that ends the entry, we return to top-level.  We enter string
       mode on seeing a """ or non-entry-delimiting "{" from in-entry mode.  Note that the lexical language is both non-regular (because braces
       must balance) and context-sensitive (because "{" can mean different things depending on its syntactic context).	That said, we will use
       regular expressions to describe the lexical elements, because they are the starting point used by the lexical scanner itself.  The rest of
       the lexical grammar will be informally explained in the text.

       From top-level, the following tokens are recognized according to the regular expressions on the right:

	  AT			@
	  NEWLINE		

	  COMMENT		\%~[
]*

	  WHITESPACE		[ 
	]+
	  JUNK			~[@
 
	]+

       (Note that this is PCCTS regular expression syntax, which should be fairly familiar to users of other regex engines.  One oddity is that a
       character class is negated as "~[...]" rather than "[^...]".)

       On seeing "at" at top-level, we enter in-entry mode.  Whitespace, junk, newlines, and comments are all skipped, with the latter two
       incrementing a line counter.  (Junk is explicitly recognized to allow for "bibtex"'s "implicit comment" scheme.)

       From in-entry mode, we recognize newline, comment, and whitespace identically to top-level mode.  In addition, the following tokens are
       recognized:

	  NUMBER		[0-9]+
	  NAME			[a-z0-9!$&*+-./:;<>?[]^\_`|]+
	  LBRACE		{
	  RBRACE		}
	  LPAREN		(
	  RPAREN		)
	  EQUALS		=
	  HASH			#
	  COMMA 		,
	  QUOTE 		"

       At this point, the lexical scanner starts to sound suspiciously like a context-free grammar, rather than a collection of independent
       regular expressions.  However, it is necessary to keep this complexity in the scanner because certain characters ("{" and "(" in
       particular) have very different lexical meanings depending on the tokens that have preceded them in the input stream.

       In particular, "{" and "(" are treated as "entry openers" if they follow one "at" and one "name" token, unless the value of the "name"
       token is "comment".  (Note the switch from top-level to in-entry between the two tokens.)  In the @comment case, the delimiter is
       considered as starting a string, and we enter string mode.  Otherwise, the delimiter is saved, and when we see a corresponding "}" or ")"
       it is considered an "entry closer".  (Braces are balanced for free here because the string lexer takes care of counting brace-depth.)

       Anywhere else, "{" is considered as starting a string, and we enter string mode.  """ always starts a string, regardless of context.  The
       other tokens ("name", "number", "equals", "hash", and "comma") are recognized unconditionally.

       Note that "name" is a catch-all token used for entry types, citation keys, field names, and macro names; because BibTeX has slightly
       different (largely undocumented) rules for these various elements, a bit of trickery is needed to make things work.  As a starting point,
       consider BibTeX's definition of what's allowed for an entry key: a sequence of any characters except

	  " # % ' ( ) , = { }

       plus space.  There are a couple of problems with this scheme.  First, without specifying the character set from which those "magic 10"
       characters are drawn, it's a bit hard to know just what is allowed.  Second, allowing "@" characters could lead to confusing BibTeX syntax
       (it doesn't confuse BibTeX, but it might confuse a human reader).  Finally, allowing certain characters that are special to TeX means that
       BibTeX can generate bogus TeX code: try putting a backslash ("") or tilde ("~") in a citation key.  (This last exception is rather
       specific to the "generating (La)TeX code from a BibTeX database" application, but since that's the major application for BibTeX databases,
       then it will presumably be the major application for btparse, at least initially.  Thus, it makes sense to pay attention to this problem.)

       In btparse, then, a name is defined as any sequence of letters, digits, underscores, and the following characters:

	  ! $ & * + - . / : ; < > ? [ ] ^ _ ` |

       This list was derived by removing BibTeX's "magic 10" from the set of printable 7-bit ASCII characters (32-126), and then further removing
       "@", "", and "~".  This means that btparse disallows some of the weirder entry keys that BibTeX would accept, such as "foo@bar", but
       still allows a string with initial digits.  In fact, from the above definition it appears that btparse would accept a string of all digits
       as a "name;" this is not the case, though, as the lexical scanner recognizes such a digit string as a number first.  There are two problems
       here: BibTeX entry keys may in fact be entirely numeric, and field names may not begin with a digit.  (Those are two of the not-so-obvious
       differences in BibTeX's handling of keys and field names.)  The tricks used to deal with these problems are implemented in the parser
       rather than the lexical scanner, so are described in "SYNTACTIC GRAMMAR" below.

       The string lexer recognizes "lbrace", "rbrace", "lparen", and "rparen" tokens in order to count brace- or parenthesis-depth.  This is
       necessary so it knows when to accept a string delimited by braces or parentheses.  (Note that a parenthesis-delimited string is only
       allowed after @comment---this is not a normal BibTeX construct.)  In addition, it converts each non-space whitespace character (newline,
       carriage-return, and tab) to a single space.  (Sequences of whitespace are not collapsed; that's the domain of string post-processing,
       which is well removed from the scanner or parser.)  Finally, it accepts """ to delimit quote-delimited strings.	Apart from those
       restrictions, the string lexer accepts anything up to the end-of-string delimiter.

SYNTACTIC GRAMMAR

       (The language used to describe the grammar here is the extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) used by PCCTS.  Terminals are represented by
       uppercase strings, non-terminals by lowercase strings; terminal names are the same as those given in the lexical grammar above.	"( foo )*"
       means zero or more repetitions of the "foo" production, and "{ foo }" means an optional "foo".)

       A file is just a sequence of zero or more entries:

	  bibfile : ( entry )*

       An entry is an at-sign, a name (the "entry type"), and the entry body:

	  entry : AT NAME body

       A body is either a string (this alternative is only tried if the entry type is "comment") or the entry contents:

	  body : STRING 		   # for comment entries
	       | ENTRY_OPEN contents ENTRY_CLOSE

       ("ENTRY_OPEN" and "ENTRY_CLOSE" are either "{" and "}" or "(" and ")", depending what is seen in the input for a particular entry.)

       There are three possible productions for the "contents" non-terminal.  Only one applies to any given entry, depending on the entry metatype
       (which in turn depends on the entry type).  Currently, btparse supports four entry metatypes: comment, preamble, macro definition, and
       regular.  The first two correspond to @comment and @preamble entries; "macro definition" is for @string entries; and "regular" is for all
       other entry types.  (The library will be extended to handle @modify and @alias entry types, and corresponding "modify" and "alias"
       metatypes, when BibTeX 1.0 is released and the exact syntax is known.)  The "metatype" concept is necessary so that all entry types that
       aren't specifically recognized fall into the "regular" metatype.  It's also convenient not to have to "strcmp" the entry type all the time.

	  contents : ( NAME | NUMBER ) COMMA fields	# for regular entries
		   | fields		   # for macro definition entries
		   | value		   # for preamble entries

       Note that the entry key is not just a "NAME", but "( NAME | NUMBER)".  This is necessary because BibTeX allows all-numeric entry keys, but
       btparse's lexical scanner recognizes such digit strings as "NUMBER" tokens.

       "fields" is a comma-separated list of fields, with an optional single trailing comma:

	  fields : field { COMMA fields }
		 |

       A "field" is a single "field = value" assignment:

	  field : NAME EQUALS value

       Note that "NAME" here is a restricted version of the "name" token described in "LEXICAL GRAMMAR" above.	Any "name" token will be accepted
       by the parser, but it is immediately checked to ensure that it doesn't begin with a digit; if so, an artificial syntax error is triggered.
       (This is for compatibility with BibTeX, which doesn't allow field names to start with a digit.)

       A "value" is a series of simple values joined by '#' characters:

	  value : simple_value ( HASH simple_value )*

       A simple value is a string, number, or name (for macro invocations):

	  simple_value : STRING
		       | NUMBER
		       | NAME

SEE ALSO

       btparse

AUTHOR

       Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

btparse, version 0.63						    2012-06-02					      btparse::doc::bt_language(3)