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

[Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>]

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