Extract all keys from a bibfile to store them in var/vec/...

[lukeflo]

Hey,

first of all, it is totally possible that I'm missing out on something. If thats the case, I'm sorry ;-)

I'm trying to get only the citekeys of all BibTeX entries. When I parse a file and print its whole content to stdout there is kind of an indexed array at the end containing all the keys. E.g.:

use std::fs;

use biblatex::{self, Bibliography};

fn main() {
    let bibfile = fs::read_to_string("test.bib").unwrap();
    let bibliography = Bibliography::parse(&bibfile).unwrap();
    println!("{:?}", bibliography);
}

will output this (full entries cut off):

, keys: {"grandsire_the_metafonttutorial_2004": 1, "gruber_markdown": 2, "how_tex_macros_actually_work": 0, "skibinski_automated_jats_xml_to_pdf_conversion_2018": 3}

As far as I can see, there is no struct or implementation to extract all (only) citekeys from the parsed bibfile. Of course, I can extract the keys on my own using some kind of regex pattern matching etc. But I was wondering if such a functionality is missing (and would then pledge for implementing it) or if I just overlooked something very obvious...

Thanks

[PgBiel]

You can use Bibliography::iter() to iterate over the entries, and each entry contains its own key as a public key field. I'm not sure if a separate keys iterator would be useful as the entries are stored as a vector rather than a hash map or similar, so it'd be equivalent to iter().map(|entry| entry.key), but it could be considered.

[lukeflo]

@PgBiel thanks for the hint. Thats indeed something I missed out on. It works just fine, just had to add .to_owned() method to get a vector with owned strings:

let bib = Bibliography::parse(&file).unwrap();
let citekeys: Vec<String> = bib.iter().map(|entry| entry.to_owned().key).collect();

That makes my code shorter and more efficient.

I would still vote for implementing this with an own implementation/method whatever, but its definitely not a must.