WARNING

This crate is under active development and the public API may change substantially on every minor version change. The (de)serialization API is relatively stable, but some of the publicly-exposed internal state may change, particularly concerning the handling of errors. Until this is stabilized, use at your own risk!

Serde bibtex

A Rust library providing a serde interface for .bib file (de)serialization. The implementation is minimally opinionated and feature-rich for convenient downstream consumption by other libraries or binaries.

For examples and a thorough documentation of features, visit the docs.

Deserializer

Here are the main features. See the deserializer docs for more detail.

Flexible

• Structured: read into Rust types with automatic @string macro expansion and other convenience features.
• Unstructured: do not expand macros or collect fields values to preserve the structure of the original bibtex.
• Deserialize from bytes to defer UTF-8 conversion, or even pass-through raw bytes.
• Error-tolerant Iterator API that allows skipping malformed entries.

Explicit and unambiguous syntax

• Aims for compatibility with and tested against an independently implemented pest grammar.
• Aim for compatibility with biber but without some of biber's undocumented idiosyncracies or unfixable parsing bugs.

Fast

• Low overhead manual parser implementation (see benchmarks).
• Zero-copy deserialization.
• Selective capturing of contents (see benchmarks for speed differences)

Serializer

Here are the main features. See the serializer docs for more detail.

Flexible

• Flexibly serialize many types which are vaguely structured like BibTeX entries.
• Sufficiently general to generate any valid BibTeX bibliography (up to syntactic equivalence), including all entry types such as @string macros, and out-putting unexpanded macros.
• Implementable Formatter trait which allows total customization of generated BibTeX.

Opinionated

• Default Formatter implementations serialize in a standardized format to guarantee unambiguous parsing even by other tools.
• Compact formatter when serializing for consumption by non-humans.

Robust

• Validate during serialization to guarantee generation of valid BibTeX.

Comparison with other crates

typst/biblatex

We do not attempt to interpret the contents of the entries in the .bib file and instead defer interpretation for downstream consumption. On the other hand, biblatex is intended to support typst, which requires interpreting the contents of the fields (for example, parsing of $math$ in field values). In this sense, we might consider our implementation closer to the biblatex::RawBibliography entrypoint, but with the substantial extra flexibility of reading into any type implementing an appropriate Deserialize.

charlesvdv/nom-bibtex

The functionality in this crate essentially supercedes nom-bibtex. The only feature of nom-bibtex that we do not support is the capturing of comments not explicitly contained in a @comment entry.

typho/bibparser

The functionality in this crate essentially supercedes bibparser.

Benchmarks

The benchmark code can be find in benches/compare.rs. The bibliography file used is assets/tugboat.bib, which is part of the testing data used by biber. It is a 2.64 MB 73,993-line .bib file.

1. ignore: Deserialize using serde::de::IgnoredAny to parse the file but ignore the contents.
2. struct: Deserialize using a struct with entries capturing every field present in assets/tugboat.bib (15 fields total), expanding macros and collapsing field values.
3. borrow: Deserialize into a fully borrowed Rust type which captures all data in the file but does not expand macros or collapse field values.
4. biblatex: Parse using biblatex::RawBibliography::parse (most similar to borrow).
5. copy: Deserialize into an owned Rust type with macro expansion, field value collapsing, and case-insensitive comparison where appropriate.
6. nom-bibtex: Parse using nom-bibtex::Bibtex::parse (most similar to copy).

The benchmarks were performed on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60 GHz (2019 MacBook Pro). The speedup factor is relative to biblatex.

The bibparser crate is not included in this benchmark as it is unable to parse the input file.

Safety

This crate uses some unsafe for string conversions when we can guarantee for other reasons that a string slice is at a valid codepoint.