Re: string searching and saving results to a variable

[Perry Smith <pedzsan@gmail.com>]

On Feb 15, 2011, at 5:15 PM, ken wrote:

> It's time again to write an elisp function!!
> 
> One thing it needs to do a couple of times is save a string to a
> variable.  The string to save will be an html header, like:
> 
> <h3>Section 4</h3>
> 
> but it could be multiple lines like this
> 
> <h3 class="newest-chapter-section-type" align="center">On
> the origins of elisp confusion</h3>
> 
> It could even be three or four lines long.  Also, the line(s) could be
> indented and so have unwanted white space in the first several columns.
> 
> Assuming the point is somewhere on that line or one of those lines, we do:

To be clean, first declare some variables

(defvar ....)

> (end-of-line)    ; to preclude the point being at the far left.
> ; find the start of the string:
> (re-search-backward "<h1\\|<h2\\|<h3\\|<h4\\|<h5" nil t)
> ;;somehow mark this as the beginning of the string???

save the current point with:

(setq beg (point))

> 
> ;find the endpoint of the string:
> (re-search-forward "</h1>\\|</h2>\\|</h3>\\|</h4>\\|</h5>" nil t)
> 
> ;;save string to a variable to do other things with... how???

(setq dog (buffer-substring beg (point)))

dog now has the string