[O] Change: no longer automatically evaluate embedded elisp in code block output Was: babel awk with table input: Code block produced no output.

[Eric Schulte]

> so, the first question is, are the semantics of parsing results such
> that random e-lisp-looking code should be executed?  (this seems
> dangerous, but may nevertheless be the intended semantics.)  if one did
> *not* want that behavior, one can call org-babel-read with the
> inhibit-lisp-eval parameter 't, which causes it to *not* try to execute
> any embedded lisp-looking code [2].
>

The reading of values that "look like lisp" as lisp is intended behavior
of the `org-babel-read' function at large (e.g., this is how we are able
to pass in the current file name through a header argument), however I
agree that this should probably not be the default behavior when reading
results from a code block.  It is much more likely that a person will
intentionally embed elisp in a header argument, but much less likely
that someone would intentionally write an awk script which returns elisp
(and if that is their goal they can simple pass the awk output to an
emacs-lisp code block).

For this reason I've just pushed up a change which does as you suggest
and inhibits lisp evaluation in the `org-babel-import-elisp-from-file'
function which is only used to import emacs-lisp results from code
blocks.

If anyone is relying on the current behavior please complain about this
change and we can look at other options.

>
> the error that eval throws is caught by
> org-babel-import-elisp-from-file, which then just silently returns a
> nil.  the second question is, should it report an error to the user?
>

This will now report the error with a message, but will still return nil
for the table cell's value.

Thanks,

>
> cheers, Greg Minshall
>
> ----
>
>> hi.  it appears that a left or right paren in an entry in a table makes
>> awk not execute.  here's an example (change ":stdin fails" to ":stdin
>> works" to see it work).  cheers, Greg
>> ----
>> #+tblname: fails
>> | proto          | no c code                   |            |
>> | pscl           | c code, just fine           |            |
>> | quadprog       | (minimal) c code, just fine |            |
>> 
>> #+tblname: works
>> | proto          | no c code                   |            |
>> | pscl           | c code, just fine           |            |
>> | quadprog       | minimal c code, just fine   |            |
>> 
>> #+begin_src awk :stdin fails
>>   BEGIN {
>>       print "starting"
>>   }
>>   {
>>       print $0
>>   }
>> #+end_src
> ----
>
> [1] in spite of its documentation, i'm not sure what
> org-babel-string-read does.  i thought it was removing quotation marks
> from strings (but wasn't sure why).  but, running this in *scratch*
> gives:
> ----
> (org-babel-string-read "this is \"a\" test")
> "a"
> ----
> rather than "this is a test", as i had assumed.  maybe that was a bogus
> test?
>
> [2] changing org-babel-string-read to call org-babel-read with
> inhibit-lisp-eval 't causes *my code* to work.  my code *also* works if
> i say ":results output" or ":results scalar"; i will defensively use one
> of these for my code.
>

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte