Re: Programmatically handling org files

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Mon, Sep 12 2016, Thorsten Jolitz wrote:
> by "non-org Emacs packages" you mean Emacs packages written in Elisp,
> but not part of Org-mode? 

Yes, exactly. My wording wasn't entirely clear, I admit.

> The org-mode parser converts an Org document into a nested list and
> provides many convenience functions to work on this parse tree. So
> org-element.el (and maybe ox.el too) is the core library for converting
> an Org text document into an Elisp data structure and working with that,

So IIUC org-element.el is mainly for getting the contents of an org
buffer in such a way that a program can work with it, but not really for
modifying the contents of the buffer itself in such a way that it's
still a valid org document, right?

> If you feel you don't need the whole parse tree, but rather want to act
> locally on the Org element at point,

Yes. :-)

> you might want to look at 
> org-dp.el

Cool, I will do that!

> with just two core functions (create and rewire an Org
> element) and a mapping functions (plus quite a few utilities in
> org-dp.el and org-dp-lib.el):

[snip example]

> Using this system, creating or rewiring an Org Element from Elisp
> requires only to define the values of the interpreted parameters, all
> the low level stuff (actually creating and inserting the new/modified
> element in text form) is left to the interpreters (from org-element.el).
>
> You just declare what you want and don't worry anymore how it is done
> (=> dp stands for declarative programming, in this context at least ;-)

That sounds pretty cool, thanks!

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments