Type: Package
Title: Helper Functions for Org Files
Version: 0.5-1
Date: 2025-07-29
Maintainer: Enrico Schumann <es@enricoschumann.net>
Description: Helper functions for Org files (https://orgmode.org/): a generic function 'toOrg' for transforming R objects into Org markup (most useful for data frames; there are also methods for Dates/POSIXt) and a function to read Org tables into data frames.
License: GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]
Depends: R (≥ 3.2)
Suggests: tinytest
URL: https://enricoschumann.net/R/packages/orgutils/
NeedsCompilation: no
Packaged: 2025-07-29 15:42:41 UTC; es19
Author: Enrico Schumann ORCID iD [aut, cre]
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2025-07-29 16:20:08 UTC

Org Utils

Description

Helper functions to interact with Org files: read Org tables, convert R objects to Org markup.

Details

Org mode is a major mode for Emacs; see https://orgmode.org/manual/Summary.html#Summary for a summary of what it does.

The orgutils package provides helper functions for interacting with Org files (reading Org tables, convert R objects to Org markup) without Emacs. Since Org syntax is very human-readable, such conversions are useful also, for instance, in plain-text emails or reports.

There are several other packages that help you work with Org files as well, such as orgR or ascii.

Author(s)

Enrico Schumann <es@enricoschumann.net>

References

Org mode manual https://orgmode.org/

See Also

toOrg, readOrg

Read Org Tables

Description

Read an Org table from a file.

Usage

readOrg(file, header = TRUE, dec = ".", comment.char = "",
        encoding = "", strip.white = TRUE,
        stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
        table.name = NULL, text,
        table.missing = NULL, ...,
        strip.format = TRUE,
        strip.horiz.rules = TRUE,
        collapse.header = FALSE)

Arguments

file

character

header

logical: If TRUE, and collapse.header is FALSE, the first row of the table is used for column names (strip.horiz.rules determines whether initial rules are removed first).

dec

character; see read.table

comment.char

character; see read.table

encoding

string; see read.table

strip.white

logical; see read.table

strip.format

logical: strip rows of format instructions, such as <c>

strip.horiz.rules

logical: string horizontal rules from table

collapse.header

logical: if TRUE, all rows before the first horizontal rule are considered table headers (as defined in the Org manual)

stringsAsFactors

logical: note that the default FALSE differs from read.csv

table.name

character: a regex; the name of the table to read.

text

character: if file is not supplied, text is read via textConnection

table.missing

what to do if a table specified by table.name is not found. Default is to return NULL. Set to string "stop" to throw an error.

...

further arguments

Details

Org tables are very human-readable plain-text tables that look like 

| Column1 | Column2 |
|---------+---------|
|       1 |       2 |
|       3 |       4 |

A line that starts with ‘|’ (after optional whitespace) is considered a table row; a line that starts with ‘|-’ (after optional whitespace) is a horizontal rule. Rows before the first horizontal rule are header lines (see the Org manual).

Depending on the settings of strip.format and strip.horiz.rules, format instructions such as <5> and are discarded. Then the function uses read.csv to read the remainder of the file/table.

When table.name is specified, the function looks for a line that starts with #+NAME: <table.name> and reads the table that follows that line.

For empty files, readOrg behaves like read.csv: when completely empty, it fails; when headers are found, a zero-row data.frame is returned.

Value

a data.frame

Author(s)

Enrico Schumann

References

Org manual https://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html

See Also

read.csv

Examples


## create an Org file with a table and read the table
tmp <-
"#+TITLE: A Table

Next comes a table.

#+name: test_table
| a | b |
|---+---|
| 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 |

That was a table.
"

fname <- tempfile("testfile", fileext = ".org")
writeLines(tmp, fname)

library("orgutils")
readOrg(fname, table.name = "test_table")

Generate Org-mode Markup

Description

Transform R objects into Org-mode objects.

Usage

toOrg(x, ...)

## S3 method for class 'org'
print(x, ...)

## S3 method for class 'data.frame'
toOrg(x, row.names = NULL, ...)

## S3 method for class 'Date'
toOrg(x, inactive = FALSE, ...)

## S3 method for class 'POSIXt'
toOrg(x, inactive = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

x

an object

row.names

NULL, logical or character. If TRUE, row.names of x are added as the first column, with column name "row.names". If a character string, the string is used as the column name. See Examples.

If NULL, row.names are added when they are not 1, 2, ... (i.e. row numbers).

If FALSE, row.names are not added.

inactive

logical: use inactive timestamps? See https://orgmode.org/manual/Creating-timestamps.html .

...

other arguments

Details

Transforms an object x into character vectors with Org markup. Most useful when x is a data.frame.

toOrg is meant for snippets of code, not for producing whole Org documents.

When you work with POSIXt, make sure that a potential timezone does not cause trouble: Org does not support timezones.

Value

A character vector, usually with class org. In some cases, class character is additionally attached.

To save it to a file, use writeLines.

Author(s)

Enrico Schumann

References

Org mode manual https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html

See Also

toLatex, function as.orgtable in microplot

Examples

toOrg(data.frame(a = 1:3, row.names = LETTERS[1:3]))
## =>  | row.names | a |
##     |-----------+---|
##     | A         | 1 |
##     | B         | 2 |
##     | C         | 3 |

toOrg(data.frame(a = 1:3))
## =>  | a |
##     |---|
##     | 1 |
##     | 2 |
##     | 3 |

toOrg(data.frame(a = 1:3), row.names = TRUE)
## =>  | row.names | a |
##     |-----------+---|
##     | 1         | 1 |
##     | 2         | 2 |
##     | 3         | 3 |


toOrg(data.frame(a = 1:5), row.names = "row numbers")
## =>  | row numbers | a |
##     |-------------+---|
##     | 1           | 1 |
##     | 2           | 2 |
##     | 3           | 3 |
##     | 4           | 4 |
##     | 5           | 5 |

## Not run: 
writeLines(toOrg(data.frame(a = 1:3)), "~/Desktop/my_table.org")
## End(Not run)

## Dates/Times
toOrg(as.Date("2015-01-01"))                   ## <2015-01-01 Thu>
toOrg(as.Date("2015-01-01"), inactive = TRUE)  ## [2015-01-01 Thu]
toOrg(Sys.time())                              ## <2017-03-20 Mon 13:23:18>

## Convert Org dates to Date

## see ?strptime: Each input string is processed as far as
##                necessary for the format specified: any
##                trailing characters are ignored.
d <- toOrg(as.Date("2015-01-01"))
as.Date(d, "<%Y-%m-%d")