ox-json

JSON export back end for Emacs Org mode

See the documentation file for more detailed information.

Usage

(require 'ox-json) somewhere and then use the org-export-dispatch interactive command and select the J key for JSON export.

You can also use the ox-json-export-to-buffer and ox-json-export-to-file functions or any of the built-in org-export- functions by passing 'json as the backend argument.

Output

An exported document looks like:

{
  "$$data_type": "org-document",
  "properties": {
    "title": ["Test file"],
    "file_tags": ["foo","bar"],
    "author": ["jlumpe"],
    "creator": "Emacs 26.2 (Org mode 9.2.4)",
    "date": [],
    "description": ["Test file"],
    "email": "jlumpe@*****.org",
    "language": "en"
  },
  "contents": [
    ...
  ]
}

The "contents" property is an array containing the top-level elements of the document (which will be an optional section element followed by any number of headline elements).

All nodes (elements and objects) in the document tree are exported like:

{
  "$$data_type": "org-node",
  "type": "headline",
  "ref": "orgd51ec19",
  "properties": { ... },
  "contents": [ ... ]
}

"type" is the node type returned by org-element-type and "properties" are property names and values obtained from org-element-property (see documentation for the Org element API for a complete list of all node types and properties). ref is a unique ID assigned to the node by Org mode's export code. Leading colons in the property keys are omitted. "contents" is the encoded return value of org-element-contents, the items of which are either more org nodes or strings.

Nested data objects

The "$$data-type" property is added to JSON objects to indicate the type of structured data they contain (the exception being generic sets of key/value pairs). See the documentation for more information.

Notes

The resulting JSON should include the correct choice of empty object ({}), empty list ([]), null, or false for the given context, even though these are represented as nil in elisp (don`t get me started).

Related software

Check out the pyorg Python package, which contains tools for reading and manipulating the exported JSON data and interacting with a running Emacs process.