Re: elisp optimization question

[harven]

> I wonder whether one could use that alist to "build" a regexp which
> you could use with regexp-replace: you could use the \, syntax to add
> lisp code to the stuff run.
>
> Rupert

Here is a short command that take advantage of the advices in the
previous posts.

(setq my-alist '(
        ("»" . ">>") ("ö" . "o") ("—" . "-")))

(setq html-regexp (regexp-opt (mapcar 'car my-alist)))

(defun w3m-filter ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (while (re-search-forward html-regexp nil t)
     (replace-match
         (cdr (assoc (match-string 0) my-alist)) nil t)))

I don't know how to pass interactively the values of the html-regexp
variable to the M-% command, though.

It's a bit strange to use regexp here. The tree structure given by a
keymap would be better I think. If the keymap would
insert a non valid prefix key sequence instead of reporting an error,
we could just actually read the html file with a keymap
binding the "&#8212" key sequence to "-"  etc.