This project no longer under active development

It remains fully functional and maintenance is still completed

Assistance with enhancements, feature requests and bug fixes are all very welcome!

Any PR's will be reviewed promptly.

BibLatex-Check

A web based version of this checker is now available: https://biblatex-linter.herokuapp.com/ (repo)

A python2/3 script for checking BibLatex .bib files

BibTeX Check is a small Python script that goes through a list of references and checks if certain required fields are available, for instance, if each publication is assigned a year or if a journal article has a volume and issue number.

Additionally, it allows for consistency checks of names of conference proceedings and could easily be extended to other needs.

The results of the check are printed to an html file, which includes links to Google Scholar, DBLP, etc. for each flawed reference. These links help retrieving missing information and correcting the entries efficiently.

Please note that it is not a BibLaTeX validator. And in the current version, it might not yet be able to parse every valid bib file. The software targets the specific needs of Computer Scientist, but may be applicable in other fields as well.

For use in automated environments, BibLaTeX-Check returns errors on the console (can be disabled). Further, it returns an exit code depending on whether problems have been found.

The html output is tested with Firefox and Chrome, but the current version does not properly work with Internet Explorer.

Getting Started

Just copy the file into a directory with write permission, then run the script

./biblatex_check.py <-b input.bib> [-a input.aux] [-o output.html]

If you provide the additional aux file (created when compiling a tex document), then the check of the bib file is restricted to only those entries that are really cited in the tex document.

Options

Specify these when calling the script.

• -b (--bib=file.bib) Set the input Bib File
• -a (--aux=file.aux) Set the input Aux File
• -o (--output=file.html) Write results to the HTML Output File.
• -v (--view) Open in Browser. Use together with -o.
• -N (--no-console) Do not print problems to console. An exit code is always returned.

Help

See ./biblatex_check.py -h for basic help.

If your getting an environment error, try using python ./biblatex_check.py or python3 ./biblatex_check.py depending on your OS.

Alternatives

BibLatex check is adapted from BibTex Check by Fabian Beck, which can be used to validate BibTex files.

See BibTex vs BibLaTex vs NatBib for a comparison of different referencing packages.

Screenshot

Development

The checker is a single python script that takes .bib files as input and prints to console and/or an html file.

It maintains compatibility with Python 2, so any changes should be run against both Python 2.7 and 3.

Any bug fixes should be paired with a new test case in tests/input.bib

"Running" the tests

python3 ./biblatex_check.py -b tests/input.bib
python2 ./biblatex_check.py -b tests/input.bib

Then manually confirm the number of errors matches the details top of tests/input.bib

License

MIT license