Chapter 16. Reference data conversion tools

Table of Contents
dos2unix
med2ris.pl
nmed2ris
bib2ris
en2ris.pl
db2ris
marc2ris.pl
Convert SGML and XML data to risx

Whenever you have an electronic source for reference data, you should use these instead of typing datasets from scratch. Reference data come in a variety of formats. Therefore refdb ships with a few conversion utilities which are discussed in this chapter.

The following utilities create tagged RIS data from the input data. The final section of this chapter gives some hints about converting data to the risx XML format that refdb supports since version 0.9.3.

dos2unix

This simple shell script converts DOS/Windows files with CR/LF line endings to Unix files with LF line endings. It is nothing more than a wrapper for tr. Use it to convert files that you downloaded or created in a plain DOS/Windows environment (if you created them with Cygwin tools or a configurable editor like NTEmacs, they should not need this conversion). To convert files, use the command:

~/# dos2unix file1 [file2...]

All files which are passed as arguments will be converted and the results will be written back to the same files.

If this is not successful on Windows, you may have to fiddle with the text-vs.-binary mode setting in Cygwin. Try adding binmode to your CYGWIN environment variable.