APA style reference and citation checker

Oh the woes of academia…
Since the journal I was submitting an article to wanted the manuscript in Word format instead of LaTeX, I was stuck with finishing my work using OpenOffice Writer. Which means that there was no automatic tool to format citations or to generate the list of references. And manually checking 20+ pages of manuscript seems like a task where human errors can really shine.
A tool is needed. I don’t want a wizard that turns a reference database into a reference list – there’s plenty of those, including BibTeX, and several web services (most of which are not free unless your university has paid for access). The problem is that after the reference list is generated and the manuscript has gone through a few peer review iterations, I can’t be sure whether I’m still citing everything correctly. So I need something that can read my manuscript and tell if there are problems. It doesn’t need to be perfect, as long as it warns about uncertain cases (which means: no false negatives).
So I started looking for a tool that would do APA style citation checking from a manuscript. And I couldn’t find any. Some Word plugins do exist, but they cost money, and require the use of Microsoft Word, which I don’t use on my Linux or Mac machines. Nothing freely available seems to exist.
So I wrote one in Python.
It took like an hour, and it’s basically just a script that does some fancy regular expression matching on the manuscript. I found several errors in mine, including incorrect years in citations, so it already paid off the work I put into it.
But would someone else like to use this tool as well? I could post the script for others to download, although I’d need to clean it up a bit. And using it might be a bit of a hassle as you’d need to download it and get it to run on your machine. Or I could set it up as a web service, so you could just use a form to submit a plain text version of your manuscript, and the service would give you a report on the citations. But would you feel ok about sending your non-published manuscript to such a web form?

Would you need a tool to check APA style reference correctness from your manuscript?(answers)