Export Plugin

The export plugin lets you get data from the items and export the content as JSON.

Enable the export plugin (see Using Plugins for help). Then, type beet export followed by a query to get the data from your library. For example, run this:

$ beet export beatles

to print a JSON file containing information about your Beatles tracks.

Command-Line Options

The export command has these command-line options:

• --include-keys or -i: Choose the properties to include in the output data. The argument is a comma-separated list of simple glob patterns where * matches any string. For example:

  $ beet export -i 'title,mb*' beatles
  

  will include the title property and all properties starting with mb. You can add the -i option multiple times to the command line.

• --library or -l: Show data from the library database instead of the files’ tags.

• --output or -o: Path for an output file. If not informed, will print the data in the console.

• --append: Appends the data to the file instead of writing.

Configuration

To configure the plugin, make a export: section in your configuration file. Under the json key, these options are available:

• ensure_ascii: Escape non-ASCII characters with uXXXX entities.
• indent: The number of spaces for indentation.
• separators: A [item_separator, dict_separator] tuple.
• sort_keys: Sorts the keys in JSON dictionaries.

These options match the options from the Python json module.

The default options look like this:

export:
    json:
        formatting:
            ensure_ascii: False
            indent: 4
            separators: [',' , ': ']
            sort_keys: true