I’m very new to Elixir and hoped someone might have a few moments to check over my first Elixir program. It’s a pretty direct translation of a Racket program I wrote, so I would especially value any feedback on more effective or Elixiry approaches.

The purpose of the program is to ingest a BibLaTeX file (@bibfile), which will be processed and written out to @outfile. Processing involves

• Regularizing the keywords (conveniently on lines starting "“Keywords = {”), so each keyword is separated by commas (rather than comma or semicolon) and capitalized
• Passing all of other lines unchanged

For example,

@book{Snoopy-Dark-01,
  Author = {Snoopy},
  Keywords = {fiction; Unfinished Books},
  Booktitle = {It was a Dark and Stormy Night}}

should end up as

@book{Snoopy-Dark-01,
Author = {Snoopy},
Keywords = {Fiction, Unfinished books},
 Booktitle = {It was a Dark and Stormy Night}}

Pretty basic, but a good learning experience.

Thank you very much in advance. I’m really enjoying both the Elixir language and community.

defmodule BibCleaner do
  @bibfile "/Users/ghoetker/BibDeskPapers/masterbibliography.bib"
  @outfile "test_out.bib"
  @moduledoc """
  Clean BibLaTeX files
  """

  def clean do
    {:ok, data} = File.read(@bibfile)
    {:ok, file} = File.open(@outfile, [:write, :utf8])

    data
    |> String.split("\n")
    |> Enum.map(&process(&1))
    |> Enum.map(&IO.puts(file, &1))

    File.close(file)
  end

  defp process(astring) do
    cond do
      String.contains?(astring, "\tKeywords = {") ->
        astring
        |> String.replace_leading("\tKeywords = {", "")
        |> String.replace_trailing("},", "")
        |> String.split([", ", "; "])
        |> Enum.map(&String.capitalize/1)
        |> Enum.join(", ")
        |> (fn x -> "\tKeywords = {" <> "#{x}" <> "}," end).()

      true ->
        "#{astring}"
    end
  end
end