external access to gnucash

[Robert C. Ramsdell III]

I'll take a stab at this and other budgeting questions that crop up every 
once in a while.  I've written a small utility that parses the gnucash save 
file and outputs the value of all accounts on a given date.  The output is in 
comma separated value format for easy inporting into a spreadsheet.

At the moment is is mainly useful for grabbing info from income and expense 
accounts.  This is because the program does not yet calculate prices for 
assets in security or commodity accounts.  Instead it reports some incorrect 
value for those accounts.

That said, I have already used trhe program to develop a budget by grabbing 
monthly income and expense numbers then extrapolating them to the rest of the 
year.  It's a little time consuming because each month ends up in it's own 
file that must be imported to a common spreadsheet, but it's better than the 
alternative.

If anyone is interested, please let me know and I'll e-mail you a copy of the 
program.  It is called 'gnc_report.py' and requires python and python-xml to 
run.  I use python 2.1.3 and do not know if the program will run in earlier 
versions (I suspect that the xml module will be the sticking point).

Robert

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 09:17 pm, Peter T. Abplanalp wrote:
> i was wondering if it is possible to get at gnucash data from outside
> gnucash itself.  say i'd like to email myself a report on monthly
> expenses at the end of the month from a cron entry or something.  is
> this possible without knowing too much about gnucash internals?  can
> someone point me in the right direction?
>
> thanks,