Re: Elisp: Search a File Without Visiting?

[kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann)]

taashlo@sandia.gov writes:

> This currently works, but it relies on loading the entire thesaurus
> file into a buffer to search for the word.  The problem is that the
> thesaurus file (mthesaur.txt[1]) is about 24MiB.
>
> My question: is it possible (using elisp) to search the contents of
> the thesaurus file *without* loading it into a buffer?

I can think of two ways to do it.  The first way is to write a
program which does the searching (or use grep) and to have Emacs
invoke that.  The second way is to repeatedly call
insert-file-contents with the right BEG and END arguments to insert
parts of the file into a buffer.

While using an external program makes sense, the other approach is
not useful IMHO.  Emacs is really well optimized for working with
buffers, so why not go with the flow and do it the way it's easiest
in Emacs, why not do it the Emacs way?

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