Parse all ledger errors / warnings

[purcell]

This initial version of flycheck-ledger was mainly developed in order to display errors for unbalanced transactions, e.g.

In file included from "master.ledger", line 8:
While parsing file "bank.ledger", line 13:
While balancing transaction from "bank.ledger", lines 11-13:
> 2012/06/01 Bank charges
>     Personal:Expenses:Bank:Fees                 3.23 EUR
>     Personal:Assets:Bank                       = 8.51 EUR
Unbalanced remainder is:
           -3.04 EUR
Amount to balance against:
            3.23 EUR
Error: Transaction does not balance

However, other ledger error messages are laid out differently, e.g.

In file included from "master.ledger", line 8:
While parsing file "bank.ledger", line 8:
While parsing posting:
  Personal:Expenses:Bank:Fees    ASLKJDSFLKDSJ
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Error: No quantity specified for amount

I'd love to get feedback from @jwiegley on whether it might make sense to review ledger's error/warning output with a view to making it consistent and easily machine-readable. Or perhaps there's already such a solution available.

[purcell]

Also, there are no column numbers printed by ledger, but the info is clearly available, as the second example above shows. Perhaps we can get that printed out too?

[jwiegley]

Ledger's output right now is a kind of "stack", which you're right, does not indicate columnar information since that info is implicit in the layout. We could perhaps add a "--machine-readable" option or something, which would output error messages intended for programmatic consumption?

[purcell]

Yeah, that'd be nice if it's easy to do, but I wouldn't want you to add any extra complexity on my account.

It's really satisfying to get this feedback inline in the buffer, and perhaps supporting machine-readable output directly would lead to better tools...

Please let me know if you give flycheck-ledger a spin and have any suggestions. :-)

Oh, and thanks for ledger. It made last week as enjoyable for me as a week of accounting could ever be.

[jwiegley]

That's awesome that you're doing this, @purcell, I really appreciate it. :) I will definitely get flycheck-ledger a spin!

[purcell]

I haven't looked in the ledger repo, but perhaps it has some files with example errors?

[jwiegley]

There are a few expected-failing cases in the regression test directory, but they aren't just pure input files.

[cpitclaudel]

This would be really great :)