Arch Linux

rich_o

Member

Registered: 2008-07-28

Posts: 49

how to substitute "plain text footnotes" with tex \footnote

Hi,

(i hope this is the right sub forum)

i have a lot of plain texts like this one (just longer and with dozens of footnotes:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit [01]. 

Footnotes:
[01] blah blah

Can anyone point me in the right direction, so i can change them to:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit \footnote{blah bla}. 

I'd prefer a bash script, Perl or python, but anything else is appreciated as well. Just don't want to do it manually.

thank you,
rich_o

rich_o

Member

Registered: 2008-07-28

Posts: 49

Re: how to substitute "plain text footnotes" with tex \footnote

As a first approach i came up with this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# TODO: allow different footnote numbering schemes, i.e. (01) or [ 001 ]
# TODO: allow different footnote markups, i.e <fn></fn>
# TODO: error-/exceptions-handling 

import re

f = open('testfile.txt', 'r')
text = f.readlines()
f.close()

# first footnote entry at end of text
index = next((i for i in range(len(text) - 1, -1, -1) if text[i].startswith('[01]')), None)

# get all footnotes
footnotes = dict()
lastfn = ''
for i in text[index:]:
    try:
        results = re.split('\[(\d{1,3})]', i.strip())
        footnotes[results[1]] = results[2].strip()
        lastfn=results[1]
    except:  # catch footnotes covering more than one line
        # FIXME: exception is very unreliable!
        footnotes[lastfn] = ' '.join([footnotes[lastfn], i.strip()])

newtext = ''.join(text[:index])

# replace
for i in footnotes:
    p = ''.join(['\[', i, '\]'])
    pat = re.compile(p)
    new = ''.join(['\{', footnotes[i], '}'])
    newtext = re.sub(pat, new, newtext)

print(newtext)

It's working, but needs some work to be reliable under other circumstances

Last edited by rich_o (2010-12-09 16:33:58)