Re: string searching and saving results to a variable

[ken]

On 02/15/2011 06:33 PM Perry Smith wrote:
> On Feb 15, 2011, at 5:15 PM, ken wrote:
> 
>> It's time again to write an elisp function!!
>>
>> One thing it needs to do a couple of times is save a string to a
>> variable.  The string to save will be an html header, like:
>>
>> <h3>Section 4</h3>
>>
>> but it could be multiple lines like this
>>
>> <h3 class="newest-chapter-section-type" align="center">On
>> the origins of elisp confusion</h3>
>>
>> It could even be three or four lines long.  Also, the line(s) could be
>> indented and so have unwanted white space in the first several columns.
>>
>> Assuming the point is somewhere on that line or one of those lines, we do:
> 
> To be clean, first declare some variables
> 
> (defvar ....)
> 
>> (end-of-line)    ; to preclude the point being at the far left.
>> ; find the start of the string:
>> (re-search-backward "<h1\\|<h2\\|<h3\\|<h4\\|<h5" nil t)
>> ;;somehow mark this as the beginning of the string???
> 
> save the current point with:
> 
> (setq beg (point))
> 
>> ;find the endpoint of the string:
>> (re-search-forward "</h1>\\|</h2>\\|</h3>\\|</h4>\\|</h5>" nil t)
>>
>> ;;save string to a variable to do other things with... how???
> 
> (setq dog (buffer-substring beg (point)))
> 
> dog now has the string
> 

Thanks!!

I'm guessing it could then be done more elispishly as

(setq dog (buffer-substring
  (re-search-backward "<h1\\|<h2\\|<h3\\|<h4\\|<h5" nil t)
  (re-search-forward "</h1>\\|</h2>\\|</h3>\\|</h4>\\|</h5>" nil t)))