Question on extracting analysis data from GnuCash

[Wirawan Purwanto]

I am using Gnucash to keep track of my personal finances. It is a great 
tool to make sure that I am not running out of my money, and to record 
every expense that I make. However, when it comes to analyzing the 
expenses that I have made, I am having quite a hard time. I want to get 
this kind of recapitulation for every month:

* Food/grocery    $150
* Electricity     $100
* Telephone       $40

... etc. This could be done near ideally using "Budget report". But there 
are several shortcomings:

1) for a yearlong budget, the resulting report is too long horizontally

2) the output format is unfortunately too rigid: it only outputs to HTML, 
and not editable. I want to tweak it here and there, e.g. removing some 
expenses that are in certain account that is "special" (e.g. incidental or 
out-of-ordinary expense).

3) the account also shows the sum total including the subaccount sums. 
While sometimes this is desirable, on my case I want to not include the 
subaccount expenses to the parent account.

Is there any way to extract GNUCash data via scripts, e.g. to a raw text 
files, or to spreadsheet, or something like that? And if possible I'd 
rather export the reports as CSV or Excel sheet or whatever format 
machine-processable, rather than in HTML or printer-ready format.
I could dive into the Scheme scripts and find out how the scripts 
work and make my own solution, but this would cost a lot of time.

This is one sore point that I could not solve by myself. Perhaps I 
overlook the solution. Can anyone point me to the right resource?


Wirawan