Re: (Not so) Short note about citations in Org

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

> On this, on the other (big) wip-cite thread, Nicolas said the following:
>
> "A drawback with allowing emphasis there is that prefix and suffix become
> parsed data and not plain string anymore. As a consequence, searching
> through them, e.g., when looking for locator names, requires an
> additional level of indirection, since you need to first transform
> parsed data back into plain text."
>
> Nicolas: I get that you need more code to do this, but are there other
> practical consequences of allowing more than plain-text?

The code I need to write does not count, really. It is 10 locs at most,
without the tests. 

My concern is the additional burden for processor developers. They will
need to shift from one representation to the other, this is not
convenient. Also some tasks then become an order of magnitude harder.

For example, let's consider the suffix: " p.32 and following" If it is
plain text, I can recognize p.32 as a locator, and replace it with "page
32" using something like `replace-regexp-in-string'.

Now, if it is a somewhat opaque parsed string, I need to first expand
it, for example with `org-element-interpret-data', modify the output as
above, and then parse it again to get a new parsed string.

I can no longer (concat "(" prefix author "," year suffix ")") either,
because prefix and suffix are not strings anymore. I need to

  (format "(%s%s, %s%s)"
          (org-export-data prefix info)
          (org-export-data author info)
          year    ;I assume year cannot contain problematic characters
          (org-export-data suffix info))

So, nothing impossible, but still slightly inconvenient.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou