Re: Google Summer of Code -- 3 Org projects for our first participation!

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

Neil Smithline <emacs-orgmode@neilsmithline.com> writes:

> I've looked at org-element.el and don't really see how it will make writing
> other Org Mode to HTML converter easier. org-element.el is, well it's
> elisp. Very elispy. No surprise but I'm not sure that it can easily be
> converted to another language.
>
> Is Nicolas working from a grammar?

Since org-element can parse 98%[1] of Org syntax, there must be
a grammar defined somewhere. When I started org-element, there was no
structural definition of Org syntax (there wasn't even a full list of
syntactic objects). Now, org-element is the grammar embodied in elisp.

Alas, I have no plan to formalize it. Though, I agree that it would be
a great thing to have in order to implement equivalent parsers in other
languages.

If someone wants to study org-element and extract a formal grammar out
of it, I will gladly help him in the process.

Otherwise, you can use the intermediary representation of an Org
document. org-element can produce the representation and read the
representation to produce an Org document.

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(org-element-interpret-data
 '(org-data
   nil
   (headline
    (:level 1 :title ("It works") :priority ?A :todo-keyword "TODO" :tags ("test"))
    (section
     nil
     (center-block
      nil
      (paragraph nil "Really"))))))
#+end_src 

Thus, you may only need to write converters from that representation to
another syntax (like HTML). That's the purpose of org-export and its
back-ends.


Regards,

[1] I still don't know what to do with "under\_line": there is no
`kludge' object type so far (!).

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou