Re: Reftex syntax table entry for "-"

[Kevin Rodgers]

Lawrence Mitchell wrote:
> Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
> and the precise symptoms of the bug:
>
> reftex-parse-bibtex-entry uses a syntax table in which "-" is not a
> word constituent.  This has the consequence that if a bibtex field
> name contains a hyphen, the entry will be incorrectly parsed.  For
> example, consider the following entry:

Is "-" a symbol constituent in that syntax table?  Can other symbol
constituent characters besides hyphen occur in bibtex field names?
If so, perhaps it'd be better to use "\\s_" instead of "-" below.

> @article{test,
> author = {A.N. Other},
> title = {Some title},
> journal = {A Journal},
> volume = 1,
> pages = {1--10},
> year = 2001,
> Local-URL = {file://path/to/local/copy/of/paper},
> url = {http://url/from/which/paper/was/obtained}
> }
>
> reftex-parse-bibtex-entry on this entry returns:
>
> (("url" . "http://url/from/which/paper/was/obtained";) 
>  ("url" . "file://path/to/local/copy/of/paper")
>  ("year" . "2001")
>  ("pages" . "1--10")
>  ("volume" . "1")
>  ("journal" . "A Journal")
>  ("title" . "Some title")
>  ("author" . "A.N. Other")
>  ("&type" . "article")
>  ("&key" . "test"))
>
> Note that the "Local-URL" field has been turned into a "url" field
> which now appears twice (with two different values).
>
> The culprit is this regular expression in reftex-parse-bibtex-entry:
>
> "\\(\\w+\\)[ \t\n\r]*=[ \t\n\r]*"
>
> if this is changed to:
>
> "\\(\\(?:\\w\\|-\\)+\\)[ \t\n\r]*=[ \t\n\r]*"
>
> then "-" is treated as a valid field character and everything works
> properly.  Alternately, one can make "-" a word constituent in the
> reftex syntax table:
>
> (modify-syntax-entry ?\- "w" reftex-syntax-table-for-bib)
>
> If either of these two strategies are adopted, then
> reftex-parse-bibtex-entry performs as expected, producing, for the
> above bibtex entry:
>
> (("url" . "http://url/from/which/paper/was/obtained";)
>  ("local-url" . "file://path/to/local/copy/of/paper")
>  ("year" . "2001")
>  ("pages" . "1--10")
>  ("volume" . "1")
>  ("journal" . "A Journal")
>  ("title" . "Some title")
>  ("author" . "A.N. Other")
>  ("&type" . "article")
>  ("&key" . "test"))
>
>
> In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
>  of 2006-05-09 on lamacq.ph.ed.ac.uk
> X server distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.60802000
> configured using `configure '--prefix' '/scratch/s0198183/applications/emacs' 
> '--with-x' '--without-xim''
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lawrence


--
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA