NAME

       Text::BibTeX::BibSort - generate sort keys for bibliographic entries

SYNOPSIS

          # Assuming $entry comes from a database of the 'Bib' structure
          # (i.e., that it's blessed into the BibEntry class, which inherits
          # the sort_key method from BibSort):
          $sort_key = $entry->sort_key;

DESCRIPTION

       "Text::BibTeX::BibSort" is a base class of "Text::BibTeX::BibEntry" for generating sort
       keys from bibliography entries.  It could in principle (and, someday, might) offer a wide
       range of highly customizable sort-key generators.  Currently, though, it provides only a
       single method ("sort_key") for public use, and that method only pays attention to one
       structure option, "sortby".

METHODS

       sort_key ()
           Generates a sort key for a single bibliographic entry.  Assumes this entry conforms to
           the "Bib" database structure.  The nature of this sort key is controlled by the
           "sortby" option, which can be either "name" or "year".  (The "namestyle" also has a
           role, in determining how author/editor names are formatted for inclusion in the sort
           key.)

           For by-name sorting (which is how BibTeX's standard styles work), the sort key
           consists of one of the "author", "editor", "organization", or "key" fields (depending
           on the entry type and which fields are actually present), followed by the year and the
           title.  All fields are drastically simplified to produce the sort key: non-English
           letters are mercilessly anglicized, non-alphabetic characters are stripped, and
           everything is forced to lowercase.  (The first two steps are done by the
           "purify_string" routine; see "Generic string-processing functions" in Text::BibTeX for
           a brief description, and the description of the C function "bt_purify_string()" in
           bt_misc for all the gory details.)

SEE ALSO

       Text::BibTeX::Structure, Text::BibTeX::Bib, Text::BibTeX::BibFormat

AUTHOR

       Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 1997-2000 by Gregory P. Ward.  All rights reserved.  This file is part of
       the Text::BibTeX library.  This library is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
       modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.