Re: Latest commit to dired-aux; maybe add string-multi-replace?

[Tino Calancha <tino.calancha@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2016, Oleh Krehel wrote:

> In which file would the new function belong?
I guess this should go to subr.el (or subr-x.el).
In that case you should use:
(car (cddr pat))
instead of
(caddr pat)
> Any further comments?
I would mention in the doc string that the returned string is
actually a copy of STR.
I would also mention the order of the replacements: only in case this
doesn't result obvious, but i guess it should be obvious.

How about passing the patterns just as a list of strings as follows?:

(defun string-multi-replace (str &rest patterns)
   "Replace PATTERNS in STR.
Return a new string containing the replacements.
PATTERNS is a list of patterns (FROM TO LITERAL ...).
Replace patterns calling `replace-regexp-in-string'
sequencially starting from (car PATTERNS)."
   (let (pat from to literal)
     (unless (zerop (% (length patterns) 3))
       (error "Length of patterns should be a multiple of 3"))
       (while (setq pat patterns)
         (setq from     (car pat)
               to       (cadr pat)
               literal  (car (cddr pat))
               str      (replace-regexp-in-string from to str nil literal)
               patterns (nthcdr 3 patterns)))
       str))

  (string-multi-replace
   "tar -c %i | xz -c9 > %o"
   "%o" (shell-quote-argument "foo bar.tar.gz") t
   "%i" (shell-quote-argument "foo bar") t)
;; => "tar -c foo\\ bar | xz -c9 > foo\\ bar.tar.gz"