Citation.js Version 0.2.10: BibTeX and Travis

The new update (Citation.js v0.2.10) doesn't have a big impact on the API, but a lot has changed in the back end. ("back end" as in the helper functions that are called when the API is used.) First of all, there is Travis build tests now. It doesn't have edge test cases yet, but it covers the basics.

Testing the basic specs

The main thing is the new BibTeX I/O system. It isn't completely new, but a lot has changed. Before, BibTeX files were parsed with RegEx, you know, the thing you don't want to be parsing important things with. This worked fine for parsing the type of BibTeX I use in the test cases, but it failed in unexpected ways in case of a different syntax and it was a tedious piece of code as RegEx usually is.

Now I have a character-by-character parser (taking escaped character into consideration), that outputs clear error messages and recovers already parsed data when syntax errors occur. This parser converts BibTeX files into its JSON representation (which I call BibTeX-JSON), which then can be converted to CSL-JSON. There are some improvements here as well, but not as many.

The output is done by first converting CSL-JSON to BibTeX-JSON. This process is improved a bit as well. The BibTeX-JSON can then be converted to BibTeX. This now supports the escaping of syntax characters (e.g. '|' into '{\textbar}').