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Comment by jcarrano | Hacker News Reader

I'm using GnuCash and not being able to easily do bulk changes or easily script it is quite annoying, for example after a slight mistake in a CSV import.

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GnuCash has a scripting engine. If you have to do a specific correction very often, it might be worth it to implement something. If possible, the CSV should be preprocessed of course.

If nothing else works, a Gnucash file is XML. A bit annoying to work with, but quite possible.

Can you share a link to the docs for the scripting engine? I've seen conflicting information over the years and I'm not sure what the latest really is.

Does this help? https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/tree/stable/bindings/pyth...

The other person said GnuCash has a scripting engine. These are just scripts. Not the same thing.

These are examine scripts for a REST API that gives access to internals of GnuCash.

Oh ok. I will have a look, thank you!

Does it allow setting values, or just reading?

It seems to be read / write https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/blob/stable/bindings/pyth....

It's one piece in one of the puzzles, but it's not really what I'm looking for.

Internally, it uses Guile. I'm afraid there might not be a good user interface to edit the Guile source files, but at least Guile is much more pleasant to work with than C and offers way less paper cuts. I think it's mostly used for reports. You might have to create a plugin to expose your own scripts in the UI.

Yeah, at some point I got the impression that I could use Guile to extend it, but then couldn't find any way to do it as an end user. Not sure if I was just wrong, or out of date.

I feel like it could do with some tutorials and guides on Guile. I would have liked to be able to do reporting and invoicing with more control through scripts, but last time I looked at it I just gave up due to lack of docs.

And since the CSV importer is terrible there are always a lot of edits to do unfortunately.

Exactly. I can try out stupid stuff, but because it's all text files and no magic, reverting back is as easy as it gets.

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