break a chunk of text into a list of lines

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

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





>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> ☄
-- 
Matt Price
matt.price@utoronto.ca