[Bug-AUCTeX] reftex-create-bibtex-file parsing problem

[Norbert Zeh]

Hi folks,

I ran into a problem when using reftex-create-bibtex-file to create a
bib-file that contains all the references cited in my latex document.
reftex-create-bibtex-file didn't find any matching references in the
bib-file, even though C-[ to include citations into my latex document
work fine.  As it turns out, this is a problem with how
reftex-create-bibtex-file looks for matching bib-file entries combined
with how I like to format my bib-files.

Here's an example of an entry in my bib-file:

@article { someone:something
, author  = "Someone, Joe"
, title   = "Something Interesting"
, journal = "A Journal"
, year    = "2002"
}

Now, to find the key someone:something in the bib-file,
reftex-create-bibtex-file looks for a match in the set of keys it
extracts from the bib-file.  Keys are extracted using the regular
expression

"^[ address@hidden \t]*{\\([^ \t\r\n]+\\),"

which expects a comma at the end and doesn't allow spaces either before
or after the key.  Thus, the function finds no keys in my bibtex file.

Locally, I replaced this regular expression with

"^[ address@hidden \t]*{[ \t]*\\([^ \t\r\n,]+\\)"

It would be nice if this could be incorporated into an upcoming reftex
version.  (Note that, as far as I can tell, this whole problem is
limited to this one function.  All other functions seem to look for keys
correctly.)

Cheers,
Norbert