Re: Pandoc Document Model in Python

[Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011-T1oY19WcHSwdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org>]

I finally had a chance to read through the documentation: wow, impressive! And by that I mean not only the library but the documentation itself. It's rare to see such comprehensive and clear documentation of a new project. For folks who don't already read haskell, it's a great way to learn about Pandoc.

BTW: It's probably too late to change, but I wonder if you should've given it a novel name? I wonder if it'll be easy for folks to find? (I'm not sure on github why it's labeled as a predominantly JavaScript project?)

Also, I wonder if there will ever be a higher level way of searching/transforming markdown in Python? Panflute is a bit higher-level and more python-idiomatic, and your examples [1] are fantastic, but I crave the intuitive XML-based selectors (e.g., eTree, BeautifulSoup, and CSS). Your API, like most, requires me to be familiar with the pandoc AST to do anything (e.g., meta is the first -- `doc[0]` -- items in the document structure).

[1]: https://boisgera.github.io/pandoc/cookbook/

In the examples below, I exercise the three options for pandoc and python. I kind of like using pandoc to convert it to HTML, use those selectors, and then convert back if need be... It's be great if panflute (or pandoc) had high-level selectors.


```python
# 1. Using pandoc API to print date
# Requires I remember pandoc data model via list indices
# No find/select; lots of iteration

doc = pandoc.read(COMMONMARK_SPEC)
meta = doc[0]  # doc: Pandoc(Meta, [Block])
meta_dict = meta[0]  # meta: Meta({Text: MetaValue})
date = meta_dict["date"]
date_inlines = date[0]  # date: MetaInlines([Inline])
print("pandoc:" + pandoc.write(date_inlines).strip())

# 2. Using panflute to print date
# Data-model is a bit more intuitive.
# No find/select

doc = pf.convert_text(COMMONMARK_SPEC, standalone=True)
print("panflute" + doc.get_metadata()["date"])

# 3. Using pandoc + BeautifulSoup to print date
# Requires me to remember HTML model, but I'm more familiar.
# Can use BeautifulSoup or CSS selectors

doc = pandoc.read(COMMONMARK_SPEC)
html = pandoc.write(doc, format="html", options=["--standalone"])
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html5lib")
date = soup.find("meta", {"name": "dcterms.date"})["content"]
print("BS native selector:" + date)
# CSS selector
date = soup.select("""meta[name="dcterms.date"]""")[0]["content"]  # CSS
print("BS/CSS selector:" + date)

```

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