Re: Query-replace is misbehaving!

[lawrence mitchell]

Siegfried Heintze wrote:

> I need to surpress the prompt so I pass nil for query but it
> still queries!  I am using emacs versino 21.2.1 on NT.

Since you want to suppress the prompt, I guess you want to use
`perform-replace' in a lisp program, rather than interactively
(if this is not the case, I'm not sure exactly where your problem
is).  However, this is probably not a good idea.
Indeed, the docstring of `perform-replace' explicitly recommends
against its usage in lisp programs, and gives a recommended
alternative.

/----[ C-h f perform-replace RET ]
| [...]
| Subroutine of `query-replace'.  Its complexity handles interactive queries.
| Don't use this in your own program unless you want to query and set the mark
| just as `query-replace' does.  Instead, write a simple loop like this:
|
|   (while (re-search-forward "foo[ \t]+bar" nil t)
|     (replace-match "foobar" nil nil))
|
| which will run faster and probably do exactly what you want.
| [...]
\----

>       (perform-replace "\\\\\\\\progra"                    ; from-string
>          (concat (colonize *msvcdrive*) "\\\\\\\\progra")  ; replacements
>          (point-min)                                       ; start
>          (point-max)                                       ; end
>          nil                                               ; query-flag
>          t                                                 ; regexp
>          nil))                                             ; delimited flags

Hence, you would probably want to write something like:
(save-excursion                       ; restore `point' to its
                                      ; original position after
                                      ; completion
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (while (re-search-forward
          "\\\\\\\\progra"            ; search forward for this regexp
          nil                         ; don't set a bound on the search
          t)                          ; don't error if search fails
    (replace-match
     (concat (colonize *msvcdrive*)
             "\\\\\\\\progra"))))     ; replace the matched string
-- 
lawrence mitchell <wence@gmx.li>