Re: newbie elisp question

["B. T. Raven" <ecinmn@peoplepc.com>]

"Pascal Bourguignon" <spam@mouse-potato.com> wrote in message
news:87k6hsdwdf.fsf@thalassa.informatimago.com...
> "B. T. Raven" <ecinmn@peoplepc.com> writes:
> > [...]
> > (defun goto-vowel
> > "Skip to next vowel after point."
> > (interactive)
> > (while (not (vowelp (char-after))) (forward-char))
> > )
> > [...]
> > What am I not understanding here?
>
> Drew answered why.
>
> I'll add that you could use looking-at:
>
> (defun goto-vowel ()
>  "Skip to next vowel after point."
>  (interactive)
>  (while (not (looking-at "[aeiouy]") (forward-char)))

Why the quotes? Is this acceptable reg-exp syntax?


>
> More over, only in iso-8859-1 there are a lot of other vowels:
>
>     ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝàáâãäåæèéêëìíîïòóôõöøùúûüýÿ
>
> (and what about semi-vowels like y? In some languages it's considered
> a plain vowel).
>
>
>
>
> One would hope to be able to use the character categories and match
\C1 as in:
>
>     (while (looking-at "\\C1") (forward-char))
>
> unfortunately, in the default category table, the consonant/vowel
> attribute is not set for ASCII characters.  You'd have to build a
> correct category table.

Which sounds like it might not be the right job for a newbie who could
commit such a boner as leaving the parentheses off after a defun
definition. Anyway, thanks, Drew and Pascal. I didn't even know about
the looking-at function but I guess I'll use it now instead even though
I don't need the power of regular expressions for my application.
I did include 'y' as a vowel in my defconst, which is what I wanted
here. Btw, supplying the missing parens after the defun uncovers another
error: bad type passed to memq. Calling forward-char before the loop
seems to fix this, I know not why.
I don't need any of the common European diacriticals but I do use
macroned vowels (y excepted, since it doesn't exist in any of the more
prepossessing fonts, as far as I know. The macroned vowels (Latin 4)
require that the file be saved as a utf-8 since there are sometimes
Greek and Hebrew characters in the same file. Which leads to my final
question: Has anyone here successfully copypasted from a utf-8 buffer to
another Windows application that supports Unicode? My emacs is a w32
build (21.3) and I can only accomplish the transfer of arbitrary unicode
strings by saving to a file as utf-8, opening or inserting the file
(encoded text) with Open Office, and then copypasting from there. Any
ideas?

Thanks again,

Ed