20030320  - initial version.
20030327  - some enhancements, i.e. parsing person lists (as in author)
            also, cross-reference expansion, macro (@string) expansion.
20030329  - major reorganization, various bugfixes, and yes: better documentation!
20030331  - bugfix: Field values like {Johannes Henkel} would be parsed as
            {{Johannes Henkel}}
20031029  - improvement to Expansion mechanism: There is now an interface method
	    getExceptions() that works just like the one for the parser. The default
	    behavior is the old behavior (all exceptions are thrown), but you can
	    enable the fault tolerant behavior by setting the throwAllExpansionExceptions
	    flag to false.
20031109  - bugfix: the parser now accepts entries with an empty citation key.
            Thanks to Nizar Batada for the test case.
20031214  - better performance - API unchanged
20031214b - bugfix: content missing in {content} - sorry, I guess this was a
            real showstopper bug ...
20040510  - bugfix: '~' is now interpreted as white space
            when persons (authors / editors) are being parsed.
            Thanks to Wolf Siberski for sending a patch.
	    some performance tweaks (interned some strings, improved parser)
20040801  - many assertions to make debugging your application a bit easier
	  - bugfixes for rendering PersonLists (author, editor) are rendered
	  - an improved parser for PersonLists
	  - optional support for multiple values for the same field within
	    an entry
	  - lots of little bug fixes
	  - much of this was done on the road between Boulder, Colorado and
	    West Yellowstone, Montana. I'm not kidding.
20070915  - Moved this project into code.google.com. The code is unmodified
            for now.

This is a bibtex parser written in Java.

To try this parser out, just grab the javabib-bin.jar file and do a 

java -jar javabib-bin.jar

to get some help.

It's hand-written, since bibtex is such an insane language. I actually
tried to write a parser using ANTLR, but it was a pain. Essentially, you would
need a different lexer for each symbol, and that's overkill.

The parser has been was tested extensively using a large collection of bibtex
files (245 Megs) from the University of Utah (ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib).
The only parsing errors I experienced were errors in the input and could
be identified easily.

The API is somewhat stable now (well, that's what I feel).
It's quite clean (at least I think it is) - check out the javadoc!

I used Sun's JDK 1.4.1 to develop this. If you try to run this with earlier
versions, your mileage may vary (you'll at least have to recompile).

Feel free to send in improvements, comments, bug-reports.

License: GPL.
Author: Johannes Henkel (jhenkel@jhenkel.de)