Org::Parser

By Steven Haryanto on

If you're like me, over the years you'll have had your todo lists scattered over multiple programs and places. First a simple text file with homebrewn format, then various Windows programs, then various Linux GUI programs, then back to Notepad and joe/gedit/kate, then various apps on cellphones, then pencil & paper (due to cellphones keep getting lost/stolen), then some cloud apps, then todo.txt, then finally org-mode. And if you're anything like me or many others, you'll find that org-mode is *it*.

I'm now in the (long, boring) process of consolidating everything in Org. For todo lists, contact lists, and even long documents and all journals/diaries. I've written a preliminary version of Org::Parser to help automate stuffs via the command line. It only supports the basic stuffs at the moment but has been able to parse all my *.org files.

The code is available on GitHub.

6 Comments

Author Profile Page educated_foo | March 17, 2011 9:22 PM | Reply

Org format is pretty hairy. Have you considered using Emacs in batch mode to parse it, or using org-export to munge it into a more parser-friendly format?

Author Profile Page Steven Haryanto | March 17, 2011 11:17 PM | Reply

Yep, I also took a look at Org-Ruby (which is geared more to export to Textile/HTML). I wrote Org::Parser yesterday for fun, since CPAN doesn't seem to have any modules pertaining to Org.

Currently I don't intend to support all of Org's features, as I don't use them anyway. The basic stuffs are pretty simple to parse.

RC | March 18, 2011 1:22 AM | Reply

Drop me a line, I am also working on an org-mode parser, but have yet to put it up on CPAN. Mine is more targetted at parsing the org-mode formatting into various outputs, like HTML.

Author Profile Page educated_foo | March 18, 2011 9:58 AM | Reply

TBH, I can't see how I could use this. For example, 

bin/dump-org-structure
looks almost exactly like
    perl -lne '/^(\*+) +(.+)/ and print "  "x length$1, $2'

Author Profile Page educated_foo | March 18, 2011 9:59 AM | Reply

(modulo blogs.perl formatting nonsense)

Author Profile Page Steven Haryanto | March 18, 2011 10:27 AM | Reply

@educated_foo: dump-org-structure is actually just an example/debugging script. Sample output (using HEAD version):

$ cat ~/tmp/sample.org
* heading 1a
some text
** heading 2a
some more text
** TODO heading 2b
* heading 1b
|a table|with 3|cols
|1|2|3


$ dump-org-structure ~/tmp/sample.org

Document: "* heading 1a\nsome text\n** heading 2a\nsome more text\n** TODO headin..."

  Headline: l=1 "* heading 1a\n"

    Text: "some text\n"

    Headline: l=2 "** heading 2a\n"

      Text: "some more text\n"

    Headline: l=2,todo=TODO "** TODO heading 2b\n"

  Headline: l=1 "* heading 1b\n"

    Table: "|a table|with 3|cols\n|1|2|3\n"

      TableRow: "|a table|with 3|cols\n"

        TableCell: "a table"

          Text: "a table"

        TableCell: "with 3"

          Text: "with 3"

        TableCell: "cols"

          Text: "cols"

      TableRow: "|1|2|3\n"

        TableCell: "1"

          Text: "1"

        TableCell: "2"

          Text: "2"

        TableCell: "3"

          Text: "3"

    Text: " "

There's also another sample script bin/remind-due-todos which will only look at TODO items which have a schedule timestamp.

Maybe I should put those two in examples/ instead of bin/.

For more general use, you might want to peruse Org::Parser directly.

What do you want to accomplish?

Leave a comment

About Steven Haryanto

user-pic A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays). My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.

More info »