Hi Greg, :results output sounds right for awk as a report formatter. I'm wondering if there is a need for :results value with awk?
All the best, Tom Greg Minshall <minsh...@umich.edu> writes: > hi. i did a bit of poking around. here are my findings, but i'm not > conversant enough with the semantics and interconnectivity of org-mode > to know what should be done. > > to summarize: if a Babel awk script returns something that starts out > with a left paren ("("), i get "Code block returned no value". > > basically, org-babel-execute:awk calls org-babel-import-elisp-from-file: > which calls org-babel-string-read [1] with each cell of the result. > > org-babel-string-read calls org-babel-read. org-babel-read > looks to see if the first character of the cell is one of {[,(,',`} and, > if it is, tries to evaluate the cell as e-lisp. in my case (below), > what is in the cell is "(minimal)" and since there is no minimal > function in e-lisp, an error is thrown. > > so, the first question is, are the semantics of parsing results such > that random e-lisp-looking code should be executed? (this seems > dangerous, but may nevertheless be the intended semantics.) if one did > *not* want that behavior, one can call org-babel-read with the > inhibit-lisp-eval parameter 't, which causes it to *not* try to execute > any embedded lisp-looking code [2]. > > the error that eval throws is caught by > org-babel-import-elisp-from-file, which then just silently returns a > nil. the second question is, should it report an error to the user? > > cheers, Greg Minshall > > ---- > >> hi. it appears that a left or right paren in an entry in a table makes >> awk not execute. here's an example (change ":stdin fails" to ":stdin >> works" to see it work). cheers, Greg >> ---- >> #+tblname: fails >> | proto | no c code | | >> | pscl | c code, just fine | | >> | quadprog | (minimal) c code, just fine | | >> >> #+tblname: works >> | proto | no c code | | >> | pscl | c code, just fine | | >> | quadprog | minimal c code, just fine | | >> >> #+begin_src awk :stdin fails >> BEGIN { >> print "starting" >> } >> { >> print $0 >> } >> #+end_src > ---- > > [1] in spite of its documentation, i'm not sure what > org-babel-string-read does. i thought it was removing quotation marks > from strings (but wasn't sure why). but, running this in *scratch* > gives: > ---- > (org-babel-string-read "this is \"a\" test") > "a" > ---- > rather than "this is a test", as i had assumed. maybe that was a bogus > test? > > [2] changing org-babel-string-read to call org-babel-read with > inhibit-lisp-eval 't causes *my code* to work. my code *also* works if > i say ":results output" or ":results scalar"; i will defensively use one > of these for my code. > > -- Thomas S. Dye http://www.tsdye.com