Re: substring and search

[Greg Hill]

Steve,

The 431 is the position in the current buffer of the "c" found by the 
search-forward command.  The 7 is the length of the string "abcdefg". 
The error message is trying to tell you that you are asking for the 
substring starting with the 431st character in a 7-character string, 
which obviously makes no sense.

Apparently you are trying to use the substring function to do 
something it is not intended to do.  See section 4.3 of the GNU Emacs 
List Reference Manual for a description of the substring function and 
how it is intended to be used.

What ARE you trying to do, anyway?  If you can tell us that, we can 
point you to the correct function.

--Greg


At 2:16 PM +0100 1/28/02, Stephen Berman wrote:
> Evalling the following expression:
>
> (substring "abcdefg" (progn (beginning-of-line) (search-forward "c")))
>
> yields the error "Args out of range: "abcdefg", 16, 7" (assuming the
> expression is on the first line of a buffer).  Why is this?  And what
> does "7" in the error message refer to?  It appears no matter where
> the above sexp is evalled, e.g.:
>
> (substring "abcdefg" (progn (beginning-of-line) (search-forward "c")))
> => Args out of range: "abcdefg", 431, 7
>
> (search-backward also yields a corresponding error message, as do the
> re-search functions.)
>
> Thanks,
> --Steve Berman
>
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