Rob Raux: Running, Programming, Parenting, Living... » emacs http://www.dragonslife.org Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:20:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 xemacs – how to use replace-regexp http://www.dragonslife.org/xemacs-how-to-use-replace-regexp/programming/emacs/ http://www.dragonslife.org/xemacs-how-to-use-replace-regexp/programming/emacs/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:45:32 +0000 Rob http://www.dragonslife.org/?p=86 The documentation available is terse on how to use the replace-regexp function.  Lately I have needed to do a rather large number of complex replacement’s across code.  Here are some things that I should definitely remember next time:

  1. M-x replace-regexp RET \(.*\)-safe RET \1 RET
    • Parenthesis used for matching values for replace always need to be escaped in emacs.  There are no exceptions and you will go insane if you do not remember this.
  2. ‘\&‘ in newstring stands for the entire text being replaced. You don’t need to match the entire string to add to it.
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