No-change entries are changed about betterbib HOT 4 CLOSED

Thanks for the report!

The way betterbib works under the hood is that it parses the file using pybtex – and at that point, all formatting information is lost already. So, yeah, to preserve the formatting, I'd have to write my own parser, which is probably outside the scope of betterbib.

I'll implement your second suggestion though and add a small tool for bib file formatting.

from betterbib.

Alright, I've made a few changed to make things easier for you and everyone else.

1. betterbib is now betterbib-sync
2. There's now a new tool betterbib-format
3. They read/write from/to standard i/o, so they can be chained together.

What you can do to preserve tabs in the the output is to run

betterbib-sync in.bib | betterbib-format -t - out.bib

from betterbib.

The ability to pipe is nice, but since betterbib rearranges the order of the fields in an entry, it isn't as useful from a diff point of view. True, with the tabs I no longer get whole entries marked as changed, but some parts of each entry are still marked as changed because of the reordered fields. What I have to do to use diff to check betterbib's work is as follows:

1. betterbib-format in.bib temp.bib
2. betterbib-sync temp.bib out.bib
3. diff temp.bib out.bib

In this way the only changes that are marked are due to the actual data correction step.

Still, the fact that I can now do this is a big improvement. Thanks.

from betterbib.

Alright, fixed that now too. The only thing I cannot influence is the fact that the author name is always separate from the rest; I deliberately put it first all the time. The other entries should remain in order.

from betterbib.