NAME

Text::BibTeX::BibSort - generate sort keys for bibliographic entries

SYNOPSIS

   # Assuming $entry comes from a database of the 'Bib' structure
   # (i.e., that it's blessed into the BibEntry class, which inherits
   # the sort_key method from BibSort):
   $sort_key = $entry->sort_key;

DESCRIPTION

"Text::BibTeX::BibSort" is a base class of "Text::BibTeX::BibEntry" for generating sort keys from bibliography entries. It could in principle (and, someday, might) offer a wide range of highly customizable sort-key generators. Currently, though, it provides only a single method ("sort_key") for public use, and that method only pays attention to one structure option, "sortby".

METHODS

sort_key (): Generates a sort key for a single bibliographic entry. Assumes this entry conforms to the "Bib" database structure. The nature of this sort key is controlled by the "sortby" option, which can be either "name" or "year". (The "namestyle" also has a role, in determining how author/editor names are formatted for inclusion in the sort key.)
For by-name sorting (which is how BibTeX's standard styles work), the sort key consists of one of the "author", "editor", "organization", or "key" fields (depending on the entry type and which fields are actually present), followed by the year and the title. All fields are drastically simplified to produce the sort key: non-English letters are mercilessly anglicized, non-alphabetic characters are stripped, and everything is forced to lowercase. (The first two steps are done by the "purify_string" routine; see "Generic string-processing functions" in Text::BibTeX for a brief description, and the description of the C function "bt_purify_string()" in bt_misc for all the gory details.)

AUTHOR

Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

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