Re: replace regex takes long

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 16.04.2006 um 01:35 schrieb Gary Wessle:

> with M-x regex-replace it shows (replaced 304172 occurrences) and it
> is taking more than 5 minutes now and still have not finished the
> task.

When the message appears in the mini-buffer the task is completed.

Could be your operating system is recovering from the task. 4 MB of  
data are a lot, 304,172 replacements (four in every line) are  
"buffered" for undo's *and* 304,172 times marks where set in the  
buffer *and* areas highlighted and in the end de-highlighted. GNU  
Emacs itself is clearing its programme stack to be prepared for the  
next command.

replace.el explains:

        This function is usually the wrong thing to use in a Lisp program.
        What you probably want is a loop like this:
          (while (re-search-forward REGEXP nil t)
            (replace-match TO-STRING nil nil))
        which will run faster and will not set the mark or print anything."

--
Greetings

  Pete     === -Q
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