On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Ken Mankoff wrote:
I've just discovered that when Org results are returned in a table, they
are modified in that leading 0s are removed. Is this a feature? A bug?
Take your choice. The feature/bug happens deep down:
- org-babel-execute-src-block
- org-babel-execute:shell
- org-babel-import-elisp-from-file
- org-babel-string-read
- org-babel-read
which tries hard to convert strings to numbers.
I haven't looked hard at this, but it seems like it would take a
significant amount of tooling to set things up to make this
conversion optional.
Is there a workaround for this? Leading 0s are not removed if the result
is a string, but in many cases a string of numbers is still a string and
should retain those 0s.
Lots of ways, I guess. But they would all involve either tricking
org-babel-read and then cleaning up the mess or processing the output
outside of org-babel-import-from-elisp.
For the latter, send the output to a file. Maybe use :file or pipe it from
your script. Then visit the file, convert it to a table, and capture the
result as a string. I think you can do this with a :post callout.
HTH,
Chuck
