Rich text

The jsonb view shows a text object as a plain string: marks (bold, links, ...) are not in it, and each block marker (a paragraph, heading or list item inserted with splitBlock) is a U+FFFC character. automerge_spans returns the structure, in the shape of Automerge.spans(doc, path) in JavaScript, so a frontend can render it or a backend index it:

SELECT automerge_spans(doc, '{body}') FROM notes WHERE id = $1;
-- [{"type": "block", "value": {"type": "heading", "parents": [], "attrs": {"level": 1}}},
--  {"type": "text", "value": "Shopping tips"},
--  {"type": "block", "value": {"type": "paragraph", "parents": [], "attrs": {}}},
--  {"type": "text", "value": "Buy "},
--  {"type": "text", "value": "fresh milk", "marks": {"bold": true}},
--  {"type": "text", "value": "."}]

-- One row per span; every link in a document; the text as of earlier heads.
SELECT s->>'type', s->>'value', s->'marks' FROM jsonb_array_elements(automerge_spans(doc, '{body}')) s;
SELECT s->'marks'->>'link' FROM notes, jsonb_array_elements(automerge_spans(doc, '{body}')) s
WHERE s->'marks' ? 'link';
SELECT automerge_spans(doc, '{body}', $2) FROM notes WHERE id = $1;  -- $2: heads (text[])

The path works like #> (map keys, list indices, NULL when nothing is there); a path to anything but a text object is an error (22023). Block values are the maps the writer stored (the type/parents/attrs fields above are the convention of editors such as automerge-prosemirror). Mark values and block contents use the jsonb mapping above (timestamps as ISO strings, bytes as base64, integers and counters as exact numbers), where JavaScript gives Date, Uint8Array, a number or a BigInt (beyond ±(2^53−1), and always for unsigned integers), and a Counter for a counter in a block. There are no positions in the result; a block counts as one character in the text's indices. Blocks nested more than 32 levels deep are refused (54000) by automerge_spans, whose rendering of them would overflow the stack; the jsonb view and every other function read such documents as usual (the jsonb view never renders blocks). Details in Rich text spans and Deep blocks.