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Cite Format

Cite Format is an intuitive way of accurately and exhaustively describing the arrangement of source information within citations. Here's an example APA book format:

^AUTHOR. (YEAR). <i>TITLE</i> (TRANSLATOR,+Trans.) . EDITOR,+Ed(s). LOCATION: PUBLISHER.

This defines output citations of the form:

  • Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1969). Genealogy of Morals (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Random House.

Syntax

There are 5 syntactic categories:

  1. boundaries: spaces ( ) and backslashes ( \ )
  2. modifiers: carets ( ^ ), tildes ( ~ ), and bars ( | )
  3. fields: uppercase strings of 3+ uppercase letters ( AUTHOR ), plus modifiers
  4. punctuation: any combination of: ,.:[]()"'
  5. extras: arbitrary strings, with whitespace represented by plus ( + ) symbols

There are 3 rules of composition:

  1. If no boundary intervenes among n elements, they're attached.
  2. Fields do not attach to one other.
  3. Modifiers must attach to a field.

On attachment

An element is said to be attached to a field if no boundaries intervene between the field and the element. In the below, the extras (HTML tags) and the punctuation are attached to the TITLE field:

<i>(TITLE).</i>

In the next case, the parentheses attach to the ISSUE field, and not to the VOLUME or PAGENUMBERS fields, since a backslash (a boundary) intervenes on the left, and a space (a boundary) intervenes on the right.

VOLUME\(ISSUE). PAGENUMBERS.

Semantics

Field interpolation and modifiers

Fields are replaced with strings; AUTHOR becomes Noam Chomsky.

If a caret appears at the left edge of a name field†, the (alphabetically) first name will appear inverted. So, ^AUTHOR becomes Chomsky, Noam.

If a tilde appears at the left edge of a name field†, all first names will be dropped, and if more than 2 names, names 2+ will be replaced by et al.

The bar modifier turns n fields into a single disjoint field, in which the leftmost non-empty value replaces the whole field. So AUTHOR|EDITOR will be replaced by the value of AUTHOR if defined, or else with the value of EDITOR.

† Name fields are: AUTHOR(S), EDITOR(S), TRANSLATOR(S), CONTRIBUTOR(S), DIRECTOR(S), COMPOSER(S), and PERFORMER(S).

Attachment

Elements attached to an empty field are dropped. So then, if FIELDA evaluates as 'Chomsky', and FIELDB evaluates as empty:

# Attached period
FIELDA FIELDB.  # = 'Chomsky'

# Un-attached period
FIELDA FIELDB . # = 'Chomsky.'

In the first case, the attached period vanishes because FIELDB is empty, while in the second case, the un-attached period remains. The same applies for extras.

Punctuation filter

The output will satisfy the following:

  • Empty enclosing punctuation ( "" '' () [] ) is dropped.
  • Bad periods ( .. (. [. ) are dropped.
  • Bad commas ( ,, ,. (, [, :, ,) ,] ) are dropped.
  • Bad colons ( :: :. (: [: ,: :) :] ) are dropped.