Programmatic way to extract citation key/citekey?

[ReaderGuy42]

I'm working on a script that copies quotations from Zotero to Obsidian, where each source has a note called citekey.md, e.g. Chiang2004What.md

For this I need to first get the citekey of the document I'm working on. So far I've been using xdotool key ctrl+shift+c to get the citekey, but this doesn't work reliably, especially for longer quotes.

Is there another way to get the citekey from within a script? I'm using bash on a Linux PC, and very open to suggestions.

This is how I'm currently getting the citekey:

echo -n | xclip -selection clipboard
sleep 0.5
xdotool key ctrl+shift+c
sleep 0.2

citekey=$(xclip -o -selection clipboard)

The first line is supposed to clear the clipboard because I was having frequent problems with the program instead using previously copied things as the citekey and then of course not finding a note with that name. But now it sometimes tries finding .md so I've increased the sleep but I'm not sure if that's completely fixed the problem.

[retorquere]

And by this you want the citation key of the selected item in Zotero? I could add behaviour to this JSON-RPC endpoint:

https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/json-rpc/index.html#itemcitationkeyitem_keys

so that you could call it wilth item.citationkey('selected')

[retorquere]

and if I put the http... into a URL bar it says No endpoint found

These links don't support GET, just POST (and also they don't work from a browser)

[ReaderGuy42]

So sorry, I'm still getting an error:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","error":{"code":-32602,"message":"/item_keys: type must be array"},"id":null}

I tried selecting a number of Zotero items and also opening a PDF but always got that error message. Any idea what it means?

Thanks so much for your help!

[retorquere]

I haven't implemented "selected". If you can open an issue I can get you a test build to see if it does what you need.

[ReaderGuy42]

Done, thanks!! #2983

[ReaderGuy42]

Thanks for the test build! I added a question :)