print

Show transaction journal entries, sorted by date.

_FLAGS

The print command displays full journal entries (transactions) from the
journal file, sorted by date (or with --date2, by secondary date).

Amounts are shown mostly normalised to commodity display style, eg the
placement of commodity symbols will be consistent. All of their decimal
places are shown, as in the original journal entry (with one alteration:
in some cases trailing zeroes are added.)

Amounts are shown right-aligned within each transaction (but not across
all transactions).

Directives and inter-transaction comments are not shown, currently. This
means the print command is somewhat lossy, and if you are using it to
reformat your journal you should take care to also copy over the
directives and file-level comments.

Eg:

$ hledger print
2008/01/01 income
    assets:bank:checking            $1
    income:salary                  $-1

2008/06/01 gift
    assets:bank:checking            $1
    income:gifts                   $-1

2008/06/02 save
    assets:bank:saving              $1
    assets:bank:checking           $-1

2008/06/03 * eat & shop
    expenses:food                $1
    expenses:supplies            $1
    assets:cash                 $-2

2008/12/31 * pay off
    liabilities:debts               $1
    assets:bank:checking           $-1

print's output is usually a valid hledger journal, and you can process
it again with a second hledger command. This can be useful for certain
kinds of search, eg:

# Show running total of food expenses paid from cash.
# -f- reads from stdin. -I/--ignore-assertions is sometimes needed.
$ hledger print assets:cash | hledger -f- -I reg expenses:food

There are some situations where print's output can become unparseable:

-   Valuation affects posting amounts but not balance assertion or
    balance assignment amounts, potentially causing those to fail.
-   Auto postings can generate postings with too many missing amounts.
-   Account aliases can generate bad account names.

Normally, the journal entry's explicit or implicit amount style is
preserved. For example, when an amount is omitted in the journal, it
will not appear in the output. Similarly, when a cost is implied but not
written, it will not appear in the output. You can use the -x/--explicit
flag to make all amounts and costs explicit, which can be useful for
troubleshooting or for making your journal more readable and robust
against data entry errors. -x is also implied by using any of
-B,-V,-X,--value.

Note, -x/--explicit will cause postings with a multi-commodity amount
(these can arise when a multi-commodity transaction has an implicit
amount) to be split into multiple single-commodity postings, keeping the
output parseable.

With -B/--cost, amounts with costs are converted to cost using that
price. This can be used for troubleshooting.

With -m DESC/--match=DESC, print does a fuzzy search for one recent
transaction whose description is most similar to DESC. DESC should
contain at least two characters. If there is no similar-enough match, no
transaction will be shown and the program exit code will be non-zero.

With --new, hledger prints only transactions it has not seen on a
previous run. This uses the same deduplication system as the import
command. (See import's docs for details.)

This command also supports the output destination and output format
options The output formats supported are txt, csv, and (experimental)
json and sql.

Here's an example of print's CSV output:

$ hledger print -Ocsv
"txnidx","date","date2","status","code","description","comment","account","amount","commodity","credit","debit","posting-status","posting-comment"
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"1","2008/01/01","","","","income","","income:salary","-1","$","1","","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","assets:bank:checking","1","$","","1","",""
"2","2008/06/01","","","","gift","","income:gifts","-1","$","1","","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:saving","1","$","","1","",""
"3","2008/06/02","","","","save","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:food","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","expenses:supplies","1","$","","1","",""
"4","2008/06/03","","*","","eat & shop","","assets:cash","-2","$","2","","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","liabilities:debts","1","$","","1","",""
"5","2008/12/31","","*","","pay off","","assets:bank:checking","-1","$","1","","",""

-   There is one CSV record per posting, with the parent transaction's
    fields repeated.
-   The "txnidx" (transaction index) field shows which postings belong
    to the same transaction. (This number might change if transactions
    are reordered within the file, files are parsed/included in a
    different order, etc.)
-   The amount is separated into "commodity" (the symbol) and "amount"
    (numeric quantity) fields.
-   The numeric amount is repeated in either the "credit" or "debit"
    column, for convenience. (Those names are not accurate in the
    accounting sense; it just puts negative amounts under credit and
    zero or greater amounts under debit.)
