Re: Improve `replace-regexp-in-string' ergonomics?

[Thierry Volpiatto]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> However, I have a hypothesis that what users really want is “I have
> this list of pattern/replacement pairs, and I want to go through each
> occurrence of each pattern in the original text, and replace them with
> their respective replacements”, without thinking about intermediate
> buffer contents. In simple cases, this can be simulated by
> parenthesizing each pattern, joining them all with a \|, and using the
> resulting super-pattern to iterate through occurrences, then,
> depending on which group matched, doing the replacement. (Harder cases
> include those where patterns have capturing groups and/or
> backreferences.)

Instead of using a list like 
(pattern replacement pattern replacement etc...) 
perhaps a list like (pattern subexp replacement ...) then you can loop
in this list doing the replacement with those 3 elements, something like
this:

    (defun tv/replace-regexp-in-string (regexps string &optional fixedcase 
literal)
      (cl-assert (zerop (% (length regexps) 3)))
      (cl-loop with str = string
               for (m s r) on regexps by 'cdddr
               do (setq str (replace-regexp-in-string
                             m r str
                             fixedcase literal s))
               finally return str))

With previous example it give:

    (let ((results "['foo', 'bar', 'baz']"))
      (tv/replace-regexp-in-string
              '("\\["          0 "("
                "\\]"          0 ")"
                ",[[:space:]]" 0 " "
                "'"            0 "\"")
              results))
    "(\"foo\" \"bar\" \"baz\")"


-- 
Thierry