In some (many!) posts I have talked about parsing bibtex files. Till now, I have been using PHP, Excel – in fact anything I could find that meant that I did not have to write my own software. I suppose I was producing a form of mashup.
All this seems to work but the problem of mash up is that they are just that and when you return to them, it is quite difficult to follow what you were doing, unless you are super organised which I try to be, but going back to a project seems to take a long time to work out what each part of the mash up is doing, let alone the order in which each element needs to be executed.
Returning to the Bibtex project, I finally decided to take the bull by the horns and write a parser in C++. That is probably a bit of an exagaration as I will only write a parser that can parse Bibtex to the standard I require for the project I need. So I don’t have to worry about getting everything working correctly, just as long as I can extract the relevant parts that I need.
I am part way through the development. For the first time I have really taken to C++ Standard Template Library. Not sure I fully understand it, but I understand enough to have got it working.
I am also trying to write the project as a series of classes, as I have some other ideas, beyond this project where I think I will be able to call on some of these classes. The aim, as with most Computer Scientists is to have a software framework that we are able to reuse for a variety of projects that will lead to (hopefully) that we can publish.