Re: Use babel to import table data from OpenDocument spreadsheets?

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

At Wed, 10 Jul 2013 09:20:25 +0530,
Jambunathan K wrote:
> James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I found a utility, unoconv[1], which I can persuade to produce a
> > tab-separated export of the first worksheet of an ODS document.
> 
> FYI, unoconv is an option provided by `org-odt-convert-processes'.

Thanks.

Okay... I finally had some time to come back to this task.

While I do appreciate all the suggestions so far, unfortunately I have to admit that I'm still stuck. What I'd like to do now is run down what I know about it so far and put questions in the middle of that.

1. I have a LibreOffice ODS file, where the table to obtain will be in the first worksheet.

1a. I can use unoconv to get a tab-separated text table out of it, in a file on disk.

1b. I will need to invoke this synchronously in an emacs-lisp block. (shell-command ...) I guess, right?


2. I want the tab-separated text to be converted into an org-table, so that HTML export will turn it into an HTML table. This is where it becomes completely baffling to the novice.

2a. There's a function, org-table-import, which looks like it will do the job. It inserts the table contents at the point. I just can't find any examples online of the correct way to do this. I assume I will have to run an emacs-lisp source block. I had been thinking I could use ":exports results" with a #+call, supposing that I could write out the table text as a stream and those results would be put in place of the #+call in the export. But of course that doesn't make sense if org-table-import is significant for its side effect (modifying the buffer) rather than its result.

2b. So (I guess) I would have to use emacs-lisp to move the point to a specific location in the file before calling org-table-import (obviously not by character index, since I can't assume previous text will not change).

QUESTION: What is the best way to do that?

^^ This is the point where I'm stuck. I really have no idea. Say I put in an org comment "# raw data here" -- how do I get the point to go to the line after that? How do I delete the entire old table before importing the new one? Working example, perhaps?


Anyway, I'll be happy to write this up as a worg page after I get it working, as it seems to me this would be a fairly common need but the information is not easy to find.

Thanks,
hjh