Hi, The notmuch command line tool has an option that seems very interesting to me: --output=json
In several languages, and especially in python, json is as easy to parse as: >>> res = json.load(stream) If your stream contains valid json, you then get all your data in res and you can immediately use it. With notmuch, some commands can bring a lot of results, and can take some time to return. That is why when I began to write a curse interface to notmuch, I added a mechanism to spawn these commands in background and gather the results asynchronously. Sadly, this makes me unable to use the built-in python json parser: As long as the output has not finished, the data on the stream is not valid json since it lacks at least the closing bracket '}'. As a consequence, I find easier not to use json and parse the data as it arrives. So I am wondering: what is the point of having a tool that is able to output json and ending in not using it? Is there a solution to make the json output more useable? One solution I've been thinking about would be to add an option: the range of results to show (something like --range=25:50). Is it doable easily? I mean: if results are not guaranteed to be in a given order, that would obviously be an issue. Same if finding the results 25:50 is exactly as long as finding the results 1:50. Otherwise, if it is doable, I guess this mail is a feature request. In any case, do you have any proposal for making sense of this json output without modifications in the notmuch CLI? Cheers, Christophe-Marie Duquesne
