Re: Splitting the input string in interactive

[Heime]

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On Friday, September 6th, 2024 at 2:15 AM, Heime <heimeborgia@protonmail.com> 
wrote:

> On Friday, September 6th, 2024 at 1:55 AM, Michael Heerdegen via Users list 
> for the GNU Emacs text editor help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org wrote:
> 
> > Heime heimeborgia@protonmail.com writes:
> > 
> > > > How much of the docstring did you read ? - Michael.
> > > 
> > > Currently one has to input a literal string from what I understood.
> > > Not variables or expressions.
> > 
> > You can also specify an expression - an expression that returns the list
> > of arguments. But not an interactive ARG-DESCRIPTOR - the arguments as
> > a list, at runtime.
> > 
> > What you can do:
> > 
> > (1) Rewrite your interactive form to use an expression that returns the
> > argument list to use. Something like
> > 
> > #+begin_src emacs-lisp
> > (interactive (list (read-string ...) (read-number ...))
> > #+end_src
> > 
> > or (2)
> > 
> > There is a read syntax for "escaped" line breaks in strings. Not only
> > for interactive arguments descriptors - for any strings. For example in
> > your case this would look like:
> > 
> > #+begin_src emacs-lisp
> > (call-interactively (lambda (s n) (interactive "\
> > sEnter search text: \n\
> > nEnter number of context lines: ")
> > (list s n)))
> > #+end_src
> > 
> > or (the explicit newline character and escaping the line break cancel out
> > each other) simplified
> > 
> > #+begin_src emacs-lisp
> > (call-interactively (lambda (s n) (interactive "\
> > sEnter search text:
> > nEnter number of context lines: ")
> > (list s n)))
> > #+end_src
> > 
> > Note that it is an error to indent the string's lines here, since the
> > indentation would get part of the string's contents. Emacs's
> > indentation commands know about this. Looks a bit unusual first but one
> > gets used to it. - Michael.

I have noticed that in the latter there is not a space after ""sEnter search 
text".
Is the correct way to have "sEnter search text: \n\" ?

Using the string approach has a number of caveats.