Re: official orgmode parser

[Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com>]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 11:17:57AM +0200, Przemysław Kamiński wrote:
> > Org mode IS an elsip application. This is the main goal. The reason it
> > works so well is because elisp is largely a DSL that focuses on text
> > manipulation and is therefore ideally suited for a text based organiser.
>
> So, I keep clock times for work in org mode, this is very handy.
> However, my customers require that I use their service to provide the
> times. They do offer API. So basically I'm using elisp to parse org,
> make API calls, and at the same time generate CSV reports with a Python
> interop with org babel (because my elisp is just too bad to do
> that).

Please consider this is a very specialized use case.

> If I had access to some org parser, I'd pick a language that would
> be more comfortable for me to get the job done. I guess it can all
> be done in elisp, however this is just a tool for me alone and I
> have limited time resources on hacking things for myself :)

Maintainer time is limited too. Maintaining a parser library outside
of Emacs would be difficult for the reasons already given. I'd
encourage you to pick up some more Elisp, which I am also trying to
do.

> Anyways, my parser needs aren't that sophisticated: just parse the file,
> return headings with clock drawers. I tried the common lisp library but
> got frustrated after fiddling with it for couple of hours.

If it's that small you could always do that in Python with regexps for
your usage if you're more comfortable in Python. Org's plain text
format means you can read it with anything. I suspect grep might even
pull headlines and clocks successfully.



I haven't looked at the elisp parser much, but I do wonder if someone
couldn't write an exporter that exports a programmatic version of your
org file data (ie: to xml). Then other tools could ingest those xml
files. That'd certainly be a contrib module and not in the core, but
might be worth your while to explore the idea if you really want to
work with Org data outside of Emacs.


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Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com

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