How to obtain the bibtex item for a question with a program or http request?

Question

Disclaimer

I asked the very same question also at meta.mathoverflow, How to obtain the bibtex item for a question with a program?, it occurred to me only now that it might be a better fit here.

The question is about the "cite" feature available on some (but not all) stackexchange sites, like mathoverflow, math.stackexchange, etc. This question is not about extending the feature to other sites.

Background

The FindStat project encourages contributors to provide references for combinatorial statistics.

I am currently redesigning the way such references are processed. In future, a contributor should only type something like [[arxiv:1234.5678]] or [[MO168885]], without providing any further information. The program then will fetch author and title from the various websites. This was (relatively) easy for the arXiv, but for mathoverflow citations (which occur a lot, by nature of the site), I'm hitting a problem:

Question

Which request should my program send to mathoverflow.net to get the bibtex, which is so well hidden behind the share button.

Rephrased: what I'm after is something analogous to a link like:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2011arXiv1111.3349P&data_type=BIBTEX

which serves the bibtex for arXiv articles.

Answer 1

On the sites, such as Math Overflow, that provide a bibtex, you can get it (and the amsref) with URLs like so:

https://mathoverflow.net/posts/{POST NUMBER}/citation

For example, for this Math Overflow question, you can get the bibtex for the question and answers with:

• mathoverflow.net/posts/105922/citation (Question)
• mathoverflow.net/posts/105930/citation (Answer 1)
• mathoverflow.net/posts/105929/citation (Answer 2)
• etc.

---

The results are returned in a JSON object that looks like this:

{
  "bibtex":   "@MISC {105929,\r\n    TITLE = {Von Neumann algebra associated to the infinite Cuntz algebra},\r\n    AUTHOR = {Ollie Margetts (https://mathoverflow.net/users/10779/ollie-margetts)},\r\n    HOWPUBLISHED = {MathOverflow},\r\n    NOTE = {URL:https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929 (version: 2013-07-28)},\r\n    EPRINT = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929},\r\n    URL = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929}\r\n}",
  "amsref":   "\\bib\\{105929}{misc}{    \r\n    title={Von Neumann algebra associated to the infinite Cuntz algebra},    \r\n    author={Ollie Margetts (https://mathoverflow.net/users/10779/ollie-margetts)},    \r\n    note={URL: https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929 (version: 2013-07-28)},    \r\n    eprint={https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929},    \r\n    organization={MathOverflow}  \r\n}",
  "example":  "<p><b>Example citation:</b></p><p>Ollie Margetts (https://mathoverflow.net/users/10779/ollie-margetts), Von Neumann algebra associated to the infinite Cuntz algebra, URL (version: 2013-07-28): https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929</p>"
}

The bibtex property contains the bibtex in a formatted string. For example, the above prints out as:

@MISC {105929,
    TITLE = {Von Neumann algebra associated to the infinite Cuntz algebra},
    AUTHOR = {Ollie Margetts (https://mathoverflow.net/users/10779/ollie-margetts)},
    HOWPUBLISHED = {MathOverflow},
    NOTE = {URL:https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929 (version: 2013-07-28)},
    EPRINT = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929},
    URL = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/105929}
}