parse xml file to get current balance in OpenOffice spreadsheet?

[Josh Sled]

On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 17:31, Dan Drake wrote:

> If I could parse GnuCash's xml data file, this would be fairly easy.
> 
> Is there a good way to do this? Ideally, I could write a little Python
> script that would spit out my net assets.

If you go with the "parsing the data file" route, you'll need to account
for GUID references [basically: object-references in the necessarily
graph-like data file], gnc-numeric data types, currencies, time and a
whole host of other stuff.  There's no single "current balance" field in
the data file; you'll need to replay all the transactions up to the
current point.

The C-level [and scheme-level, for that matter] APIs to do it are pretty
straightforward, if you're willing to wade those waters.  There's no
python bindings for the gnucash C libraries.  There's no simple
programatic network API [RPC, XML/RPC, SOAP, HTTP or otherwise].

More simply, you may want to periodically generate -- manually -- the
appropriate report and save it as HTML, then extract the value from
that.  That will deal with most of the application semantics, and give
you the single data-point you're after.

[To make that better: extend gnucash's command-line to support something
like "--generate <this-report> on <this-datafile> and export to
<this-html-file>.]

...jsled

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