bbl2bib(1)

bbl2bib1

Convert thebibliography environment to a bib file

Usage

bbl2bib.pl [-d] [-u] [-o output] file

Options

[-d]

Send debugging output to stdout

-o output

Output file. If this option is not used, the name for the output file is formed by changing the extension to ".bib"

-u

Do not clean URL fields.

Normally "bbl2bib" recognizes URL fields of the kind "http://dx.doi.org" and their variants and converts them to DOI fields (see also biburl2doi(1) script). The switch -u suppresses this cleanup.

Overview

The script tries to reconstruct a "bib" file from the corresponding "thebibliography" environment. One can argue that this operation is akin to reconstructing a cow from the steak. The way the script does it is searching for the entry in the MR database, and creating the corresponding BibTeX fields.

The script reads a TeX or Bbl file and extracts from it the "thebibliography" environment. For each bibitem it creates a plain text bibliography entry, and then tries to match it in the database.

Input file

We assume some structure of the input file:

1.

The bibliography is contained between the lines

   \begin{thebibliography}...

and

   \end{thebibliography}
2.

Each bibliography item starts from the line

   \bibitem[...]{....}

Examples

   bbl2bib  -o - file.tex > result.bib
   bbl2bib  -o result.bib file.bbl
   bbl2bib  file.tex

Releases

5 releases since Debian 10 (Buster); the text changed 3 times.

  1. 10–11
  2. 12
  3. 13
  4. Arch

Author

Boris Veytsman

From texlive-doc 2026.1-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.