Support reading from arbitrary connections.

[romainfrancois]

From an email exchange with Kurt:

romain writes:

Le 2013-07-29 21:06, Kurt Hornik a écrit :

Romain Francois writes:

Hello,
I've seen that you've released a new version of bibtex. Thanks and
oops
for the missing fclose.

Sure---was reported by someone on Windows who could not file.remove
the
.bib he had just read in ...

There was a tweet from Gavin Simpson:
https://twitter.com/ucfagls/status/360621762578354176

"
Anyone aware of a bibtex parser for #rstats that doesn't need to
read
from files? Looking to parse strings pulled from a web API
"

I guess it would not be too hard to give read.bib the ability to
read
from a character vector rather than from a file. I might have a go
at
this.

Great. Ideally, this would work from arbitrary connections

Best
-k

Maybe I need a fresh look at connections, but last time I tried to use
them in C(++), I could not find an api.

Some is exposed via R_ext/Connections.h (with a note that code should
test for R_CONNECTIONS_VERSION).

(Seems that this is currently not used in any CRAN package ...)

Best
-k

One way is to call back an R function to get some more characters to
feed in to the lexer, but this would not be very efficient.

Romain