curling down bibtex

When I wrote the last post I really wanted to use curl to turn rfc numbers and drafts into bibtex entries. I did have a look, but I had other things to do that seem urgent and I didn't follow it through.

That was lazy of me, the page will generate an error message with a url when given an rfc or draft that doesn't exist. I looked at this url with a valid rfc, but it wasn't clear how to turn the returned info into a bibtex entry.

Stripping that div off the page makes the url visible:

Failed to read RFC or Internt-Draft resource at http://xml2rfc.tools.ietf.org/public/rfc/bibxml/reference.RFC.9999.xml

Using that url format with a valid rfc number (Our beloved RFC768 ) spits out this xml document:

$ curl  http://xml2rfc.tools.ietf.org/public/rfc/bibxml/reference.RFC.0768.xml
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<reference  anchor='RFC0768' target='http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc768'>
<front>
<title>User Datagram Protocol</title>
<author initials='J.' surname='Postel' fullname='J. Postel'><organization /></author>
<date year='1980' month='August' />
</front>
<seriesInfo name='STD' value='6'/>
<seriesInfo name='RFC' value='768'/>
<seriesInfo name='DOI' value='10.17487/RFC0768'/>
</reference>

That is how far I got when I gave up earlier. Looking at the page again I thought I might try looking at the network traffic it generates.

That is much more interesting, the page itself is doing a request to https://sysnetgrp.no-ip.org . Lets try a curl there and see what we get:

$ curl "https://sysnetgrp.no-ip.org/rfc/rfcbibtex.php?type=RFC&number=768"    
@techreport{RFC0768,
  author = {J. Postel},
  title = {User Datagram Protocol},
  howpublished = {Internet Requests for Comments},
  type = {STD},
  number = {6},
  year = {1980},
  month = {August},
  issn = {2070-1721},
  publisher = {RFC Editor},
  institution = {RFC Editor},
  url = {http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc768.txt},
  note = {\url{http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc768.txt}},
}

Much better!