Re: How to do a massive unfill paragraph operation over several hundred files?

[Gerald Wildgruber <wildgruber@tu-berlin.de>]

On Do, Okt 04 2018, Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Main problem seems to be: how to iterate through ALL paragraphs of the buffer programmatically, applying "fill-paragraph" each time anew.
>
> Perhaps this?
>
> (let ((fill-column most-positive-fixnum))
>   (dolist (f (directory-files-recursively
>               "dir/with/my/files/" (rx (or ".tex" ".org") eos)))
>     (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect f)
>       (while (not (eobp))
>         (fill-paragraph)
>         (org-forward-paragraph))
>       (save-buffer))))

Thanks Noam, this almost did it! but I couldn't see through a last problem, it sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. Here's the solution someone from the emacs Org mode mailing list pointed me to:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2018-10/msg00070.html

I had to UNFOLD the entries before working on them, even programmatically, via "(org-show-all)".

I do this now from a lisp buffer and both functions work exactly as expected:

single file:
============

(let ((fill-column most-positive-fixnum))
  (dolist (f (list "~/lorem.org"))
    (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect f)
      (org-show-all)
      (while (not (eobp))
        (fill-paragraph)
        (org-forward-paragraph))
      (save-buffer))))


recursively through dir tree:
=============================

(let ((fill-column most-positive-fixnum))
  (dolist (f (directory-files-recursively
              "/dirs/with/org/files/" (rx (or ".org" ".outl") eos)))
    (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect f)
      (org-show-all)
      (while (not (eobp))
        (fill-paragraph)
        (org-forward-paragraph))
      (save-buffer))))


That's great; I'm glad it works now from within emacs itself (and not via sed, awk or tr as I tried before), harnessing all the knowledge the editor has of its own constructs, especially with some of the more complicated list and enumeration structures, -- all of them are correctly unfilled. This is solved now.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed!

Gerald.


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