Recursion limit exceeded

[cristianvasquez]

Hello @zoni, thanks for this plugin!. It's amazing.

My report:

When exporting the note:

Transcluding.md, with the contents:

The action of ![[Transcluding]]

I get:

Error: Failed to export '/home/cvasquez/obsidian/public-garden/Transcluding.md'

Caused by:
    Recursion limit exceeded

Location:
    /home/cvasquez/.cargo/registry/src/git.luolix.top-1ecc6299db9ec823/obsidian-export-0.2.0/src/main.rs:45:19

[zoni]

Hey there @cristianvasquez!

To make sure I understand correctly:

1. You have a note Transcluding.md
2. This note includes itself (it contains ![[Transcluding]])
3. You run into the Recursion limit exceeded error when trying to export a vault with this note.

Is that correct? If so, this is by design. A note which includes itself would otherwise lead to infinite recursion (which would eventually cause the program to abort with a panic).

I'm not sure off-hand how Obsidian itself handles this (I think it embeds about 7 iframes and then just stops?) but I chose to make this an explicit error to make a note like this very obvious.

Would you prefer to see a different behavior here?

[cristianvasquez]

I don't know what should be expected. But this behavior forced me to change my notes, otherwise, I cannot export.

This happens if there is any 'closed circuit' in notes that expand.

By the way, why it expands the notes?

[cristianvasquez]

Perhaps some sort of .gitignore but for the export would allow ignoring,

Or a fail silently option?

[zoni]

This happens if there is any 'closed circuit' in notes that expand.

By this, do you mean note A which transcludes note B, where note B in turn transcludes note A again?

By the way, why it expands the notes?

I'm afraid I don't understand this question, could you elaborate?

Perhaps some sort of .gitignore but for the export would allow ignoring,

This is already supported, see https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export#ignoring-files 😄

Or a fail silently option?

I think I'd like to understand the use-case slightly better before adding functionality, but I wouldn't be opposed to implementing something like that.

[cristianvasquez]

Oh!... the ignore option was what I looked for :)

Regarding the question, I still don't get why a Recursion limit happened :) shouldn't each note be processed only once?

[zoni]

shouldn't each note be processed only once?

The current implementation is somewhat naive in that regard.

This function is responsible for parsing an Obsidian Markdown file:

obsidian-export/src/lib.rs

Line 243 in 7027290

fn parse_obsidian_note<'a>(path: &Path, context: &Context) -> Result<MarkdownTree<'a>> {

If this encounters the ![[embed]] syntax, it calls embed_file:

obsidian-export/src/lib.rs

Lines 301 to 303 in 7027290

	Event::Text(CowStr::Borrowed("![")) => {
	let mut elements = embed_file(&text, &context)?;
	tree.append(&mut elements);

embed_file, in turns, calls the parse_obsidian_note function from above again if it encounters another Markdown file:

obsidian-export/src/lib.rs

Line 341 in 7027290

Some("md") => parse_obsidian_note(&path, &context)?,

This is what allows a loop to be created.

However, I'm already passing through a context struct to hold information about the note that is being processed:

obsidian-export/src/lib.rs

Lines 90 to 97 in 7027290

	#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
	/// Context holds parser metadata for the file/note currently being parsed.
	struct Context<'a> {
	file: PathBuf,
	vault_contents: &'a [PathBuf],
	frontmatter_strategy: FrontmatterStrategy,
	note_depth: u32,
	}

Technically, I would be able to keep track of all files that we've processed up to the root note, which would allow implementing the exact behavior you mention (skip a note if it's already been processed). I may play around with that and implement this (possibly as an optional mode) somewhere over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned 😄

[zoni]

Hey @cristianvasquez, happy new year. 😃

I've just published v0.5.0 which includes a new option, --no-recursive-embeds, to skip processing files more than once within the same note. I believe this will give you the behavior you were looking for.

[cristianvasquez]

happy new year to you @zoni ! Thanks for the new option :)