Re: Input from buffer instead of minibuffer

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <58f60ac7-2407-411c-92ba-13a4550f682a@googlegroups.com>,
 Michael Haensel <mhaensel73@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone -
> 
> I'm writing a quiz program in Emacs Lisp. The program creates a new frame and 
> buffer for the quiz questions. The quiz then runs something like this:
> 
> (insert "Please identify: [quiz item]")
> (setq response
>        (read-from-minibuffer "Please identify: [quiz item]"))
> ... do stuff based on response
> 
> This displays the question in the buffer and the minibuffer. The response is 
> read in from the minibuffer. This isn't deal-breakingly bad, but a better 
> design would read the response from the buffer and skip the minibuffer 
> entirely.
> 
> Is there an easy way to read a response from the buffer instead of the 
> minibuffer? If it matters, a "response" is a string of 1-8 alphabetic 
> characters terminated by a newline/return key.

Nothing built-in, but it should be pretty straightforward to write a 
command that looks in the buffer to find the response, and bind the 
Return key to this command.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***