Book filename generator

What it does

Prompts for an author name, year, and title, then formats them into a citation key like:

CAMUS-1942-LeMytheDeSisyphe

Accents are stripped, the author is uppercased, and the title is converted to CamelCase. The result is printed and copied to the clipboard automatically via pbcopy.

The script

Save this as ~/scripts/citekey.py (or any path you prefer):

import sys, unicodedata, re, subprocess

def remove_accents(text):
    return ''.join(
        c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)
        if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'
    )

def to_camel(title):
    title = remove_accents(title)
    words = re.split(r"[^a-zA-Z0-9]+", title)
    return ''.join(w.capitalize() for w in words if w)

def to_author(name):
    name = remove_accents(name)
    name = re.sub(r"[^a-zA-Z0-9]", "", name)
    return name.upper()

print("Author name:  ", end="", flush=True)
author = input().strip()
print("Year:         ", end="", flush=True)
year = input().strip()
print("Title:        ", end="", flush=True)
title = input().strip()

result = f"{to_author(author)}-{year}-{to_camel(title)}"
print(f"\n{result}")

subprocess.run("pbcopy", input=result.encode(), check=True)
print("(copied to clipboard)")

How it works

The key is formatted as AUTHOR-YEAR-CamelCaseTitle.

Part	Rule	Example input	Output
Author	Strip accents, remove non-alphanumeric, uppercase	Simone de Beauvoir	SIMONEDEBEAUVOIR
Year	Used as-is	1949	1949
Title	Strip accents, split on non-alphanumeric, CamelCase each word	Le deuxième sexe	LeDeuxiemeSexe

Accents are removed by decomposing characters into their base letter and combining mark (NFD normalization), then discarding any character in the Mn (Mark, Nonspacing) Unicode category.

Example

Author name:   Albert Camus
Year:          1942
Title:         Le Mythe de Sisyphe

CAMUS-1942-LeMytheDeSisyphe
(copied to clipboard)

Add to ~/.zshrc

Add a citekey function to your ~/.zshrc so you can call it from anywhere:

citekey() {
  python3 ~/scripts/citekey.py
}

Or as a one-liner alias if you prefer:

alias citekey="python3 ~/scripts/citekey.py"

Then reload your shell:

source ~/.zshrc

Run it with:

citekey

Requirements

• Python 3 (ships with macOS)
• pbcopy — available by default on macOS (clipboard copy will fail on Linux; replace pbcopy with xclip -selection clipboard or wl-copy depending on your setup)