Extract information from a document

Assumptions:

You’ve successfully installed Asciidoctor.js.

To make it easier to understand, in the following examples, we will use this sample file:

sample.adoc

= The Documentation Chronicles: Based on True Events
Kismet Chameleon <kismet@asciidoctor.org>
v1.0, October 2, 2018: First incarnation

== The Ravages of Writing

Document header

Get the document title

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.getDocumentTitle()) // The Documentation Chronicles: Based on True Events

By default, the document title is separated into a main title and subtitle using the industry standard, a colon followed by a space. You can partition the title from the API when calling the getDocumentTitle function:

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
const doctitle = doc.getDocumentTitle({ partition: true })
console.log(doctitle.getMain())     // The Documentation Chronicles
console.log(doctitle.getSubtitle()) // Based on True Events
console.log(doctitle.getCombined()) // The Documentation Chronicles: Based on True Events
console.log(doctitle.hasSubtitle()) // true

Get the author

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.getAuthor()) // Kismet Chameleon

Asciidoctor uses the author’s name and email to assign values to a number of built-in attributes that can be used throughout the document’s body but also retrieved with the getAttribute function:

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.getAttribute('author'))         // Kismet Chameleon
console.log(doc.getAttribute('firstname'))      // Kismet
console.log(doc.getAttribute('lastname'))       // Chameleon
console.log(doc.getAttribute('middlename'))     // undefined
console.log(doc.getAttribute('authorinitials')) // KC
console.log(doc.getAttribute('email'))          // kismet@asciidoctor.org

These attributes include:

author: The author’s full name, which includes all of the characters or words prior to a semicolon (;), angle bracket (<) or the end of the line.
firstname: The first word in the author attribute.
lastname: The last word in the author attribute.
middlename: If a firstname and lastname are present, any remaining words or characters found between these attributes are assigned to the middlename attribute.
authorinitials: The first character of the firstname, middlename, and lastname attributes.
email: An email address, delimited by angle brackets (<>).

Get the document revision information

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.getRevisionDate())   // October 2, 2018
console.log(doc.getRevisionNumber()) // 1.0
console.log(doc.getRevisionRemark()) // First incarnation

Alternatively, you can also get all the revision information at once:

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
const revisionInfo = doc.getRevisionInfo()
console.log(revisionInfo.getDate())   // October 2, 2018
console.log(revisionInfo.getNumber()) // 1.0
console.log(revisionInfo.getRemark()) // First incarnation

You can also check if the document contains revision info with hasRevisionInfo function:

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.hasRevisionInfo()) // true

As with the author, revision information is also available as built-in attributes:

const doc = await loadFile('sample.adoc')
console.log(doc.getAttribute('revdate'))   // October 2, 2018
console.log(doc.getAttribute('revnumber')) // 1.0
console.log(doc.getAttribute('revremark')) // First incarnation

revdate: Date of document version
revnumber: Version number of the document
revremark: Version comments

What’s next?

You can read the API docs to learn more about the API.