Xah Lee has a new and useful tutorial out. It’s about the APIs available for parsing Org files. None of the information is new—it’s all documented somewhere—but it’s very useful to have everything in one place. As Lee discovered, it can be hard to get a complete picture.
Of course, most of us won’t need these APIs for our everyday work with Org-mode but if you want to deal with Org files programmatically, his tutorial will be a real help. He considers three APIs:
- The Mapping API
- The Property API
- The org-element API
Lee gives examples of their use and shows the output you can expect for some of the functions. He also gives pointers to the official documentation in case you want more details. It’s a nice tutorial and worth bookmarking if you think you may need to write some code that deals with Org files and their structure.