Exporting a single column of an org-table

Question

I want to export (not sure if that's the right word) a single column of an org-table as text, with the elements separated by commas. Eg if the table is

| x  | y  |
|----+----|
|  0 |  1 |
|  2 |  3 |
|  4 |  5 |
|  6 |  7 |
|  8 |  9 |

I want to get the result 0,2,4,6,8.

In this case I want the first column, but I'd like a solution that allows me to export any single column.

Answer 1

You can make a function to get the desired column and create a string with all the values. For example:

#+name: tbl
| x  | y  |
|----+----|
|  0 |  1 |
|  2 |  3 |
|  4 |  5 |
|  6 |  7 |
|  8 |  9 |

#+begin_src elisp :var x=tbl col=0
(mapconcat (lambda (r) (number-to-string (nth col r))) x ",")
#+end_src

#+RESULTS:
: 0,2,4,6,8

nth selects the desired column for a row. In order to concatenate all into a string, the number must be converted to a string with number-to-string.

Finally, the above operation is passed to mapconcat, which will form the string with the desired delimiter.

If you don't want the actual table in the exported output, wrap it inside a COMMENT block.