Re: break a chunk of text into a list of lines

[Andreas Politz]

Matt Price wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 07:50 -0800, Xah wrote:
>
> > Can you make your question into one specific question?
> >
> > if you can make just one specific question, as much as possible to
> > your problem, it's likely to get much useful replies.
> >
> > from scanning several replies, here's what i think might be helpful.
> >
> > if you want to write elisp to call some other script and process the
> > result, it's fairly easy. If you can be specific about what command
> > you want to call and how you want to parse the result, we can help
> > better.
> >
> > The following tutorial will probably help:
> >
> > • Elisp Wrapper For Perl Scripts
> > http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp_perl_wrapper.html
> > (you can use your existing knowledge of a scripting lang and turn them
> > into elisp command)
> >
> > • Elisp Lesson: Writing image-linkify Function
> > http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp_image_tag.html
> > (contains example of calling external script and process its result)
>
> Xah,
>
> thanks for the helpful links -- also thanks to other folks who have been
> helping on this thread.  I think i have two questions, so i'll write
> them in two seperate emails.
>
> I have a python script that queries my evolution database and returns a
> series of lines, with one address per line:
>
> matt@gont:~$ python evo-query.py matt
>  14 matches in 874 entries
> matt@mdke.org   Matthew East
> matt.price@utoronto.ca  Matt Price
> moptop99@gmail.com Matt Price
> mdz@canonical.com Matt Zimmerman
> Matty_fontaine@hotmail.com Matt Fontaine
> matt.price@utoronto.ca  Matt Price
> mjg59@srcf.ucam.org Matthew Garrett
> myatesmyates@yahoo.com  Matthew Yates
> matthias.doerries@gersulp.u-strasbg.fr Matthias Dörries
> matthew.flaschen@gatech.edu Matthew Flaschen
> mcdavey@mrao.cam.ac.uk  Matt Davey
> matt@madhaus.cns.utoronto.ca Matt Wilks
> MattVermeulen@gmail.com Matthew Vermeulen
> matthewreedy@yahoo.com  matthewreedy
>
> (note the not-so-well-maintained duplicates!)
>
> i've written a short function based on one of your examples that grabs
> this output -- i imagine it needs some fixing up, but here it is:
> (defun query-python-addressbook (name)
>   (interactive "s To:" )
>   (setq cmd-name "python /home/matt/evo-query.py")
>   (setq sh-output (shell-command-to-string (concat cmd-name " " name)))
>   (message "%s" sh-output)
>   )
>
> (query-python-addressbook "matt") now returns a message with the this
> text.  instead i'd like it to return a list of names.  i'm sure someone
> will point me to the right info node, but i'm having some difficulty
> navigating the immense amounts of documentation -- is there a simple way
> to take each line of a text block and turn it into a list of lines?  
>
> thanks much! -- second quesiton to follow...
>
> matt

As Xah pointed out `split-string' is the way to go. Btw `cmd-name' and 
`sh-output'
will become global variables with your code. I doubt that's what you want. 
Better use
let-forms.

(defun query-python-addressbook (name)
    (interactive "s To:")
    (let ((cmd-name "python /home/matt/evo-query.py"))
         (split-string (shell-command-to-string (concat cmd-name " " name)) 
"\n" t)))


In this case the variable is probably superficial anyway.

-ap