Using vd for json/yaml (bibliography)

[reagle]

I'm thrilled that I can use vd to view json/yaml, which are the formats I keep my bibliographies in. However, I'm don't understand how vd presents nested structures. For example, in the following I think it is telling me there are 5 authors, but what are the {2}s? That there is a nesting for first and last name?

I'm also wondering how to query/filter, on dates, for example:

Setting it to a date type @ doesn't work as I expected. Is anyone using visidata in this way and have suggestions (e.g., find all entries with author X and published between Y and Z)?

[saulpw]

Hey @reagle, yes, [2] and {2} represent container objects (list and dict, respectively). You probably want to use ( to expand dicts into multiple columns. For lists you can use ( also if you want them columnarly, or zM to unfurl them into multiple rows.

For dates, python-dateutil understands a lot of formats, but it doesn't understand this date-parts list object yet :) You'll have to make a new column (probably using =) that formats it into a date string, and then you can use @ on that.

[saulpw]

BTW is this a common bibliography format, or a custom one that you came up with?

[reagle]

Okay, that information is helpful. After trying unfurl and melt (which I read about in the tutorial), I don't yet understand them, so I'll have to tinker some more.

The bibliography formats are CSL JSON (and CSL YAML, which is much slower to parse understandably) specified by the Citation Style Language (CSL) and used by pandoc and other citeproc apps.

[geekscrapy]

So, in this example the underlying data is like?:

[{family:v1, given: v2},{family:v1, given: v2}]

FWIW @spw this is the kind of formatting I was referring to a while back. I find a little hard to understand at first glance and I think you really need to know a bit of python to fully understand it

[reagle]

Here's the example in CSL JSON:

{ "id": "ReagleEtal1999apu",
  "type": "report",
  "author": [
      { "family": "Reagle", "given": "Joseph M." },
      { "family": "Weitzner", "given": "Daniel J." },
      { "family": "Rein", "given": "Barry D." },
      { "family": "Stephens", "given": "Garland T." },
      { "family": "Lebowitz", "given": "Henry C." }
    ],
  "custom2": "pubs.mm",
  "issued": {"date-parts": [ [ 1999, 10 ] ]
  },
  "publisher": "W3C",
  "title": "Analysis of P3P and US Patent 5,862,325",
  "genre": "Note",
  "URL": "http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P-analysis"

}

[reagle]

BTW: How can I easily search an author field that is a 3 items list ([3]{2})? I think the /` only matches the last name of the first item?

[saulpw]

The easiest way is set the column type to str (with ~), and then search within that. You can use z~ to change the type back to anytype.