Emacs Lisp is a powerful programming language that allows you to customize and extend your Emacs editor. One common task when working with text in Emacs Lisp is extracting or copying text from a buffer. In this blog post, we will explore different ways of getting text from an Emacs buffer.
1. Using buffer-substring
The buffer-substring
function is a simple and straightforward way to extract text from a buffer. It takes two arguments: start and end positions, and returns the corresponding text.
(let ((start (point-min))
(end (point-max)))
(buffer-substring start end))
In this example, we extract the entire buffer by setting the start position to (point-min)
and the end position to (point-max)
.
2. Using buffer-substring-no-properties
If you want to exclude text properties (such as font face or color) from the extracted text, you can use the buffer-substring-no-properties
function. It works the same way as buffer-substring
.
(let ((start (point-min))
(end (point-max)))
(buffer-substring-no-properties start end))
3. Using buffer-string
The buffer-string
function returns the entire contents of the current buffer as a string. This is a convenient way to extract text when you don't need to specify start and end positions.
(buffer-string)
4. Using region
If you have an active region in your Emacs buffer, you can use the region-beginning
and region-end
functions to get the start and end positions of the selected text. You can then use buffer-substring
or buffer-substring-no-properties
to extract the text.
(let ((start (region-beginning))
(end (region-end)))
(buffer-substring start end))
5. Using thing-at-point
The thing-at-point
function allows you to retrieve different types of text at the current point. You can specify the type of thing using the thing
argument. For example, to get the word at point, you can use (thing-at-point 'word)
.
(thing-at-point 'word)
You can also combine thing-at-point
with bounds-of-thing-at-point
to retrieve the start and end positions of the thing.
(let ((bounds (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'word)))
(buffer-substring (car bounds) (cdr bounds)))
These are just a few examples of different ways to extract text from an Emacs buffer in Emacs Lisp. Depending on your specific use case, you may choose a different approach. Emacs Lisp provides a wide range of functions and tools to manipulate text, giving you the flexibility to perform various text-related operations in Emacs.
If you know any other way of obtaining the text from the buffer, please let us know in the comments section. I would love to learn more tricks about Elisp functions for getting text from the buffer.
Top comments (1)
good Job