On Apr 30, 1:09 am, Sebastien LE MAGUER <Sebastien.Le_mag...@irisa.fr>
wrote:
Hi,
I wonder how to extract lines using a regexp. My file contains something
like that :
<useless lines>
<line X>
theq() :
<useless lines>
and I want to extract all lines before theq (here line X)
does anyone have an idea ?
regex is very limited in extracting text that span multiple lines.
what you want can be done in emacs, but we need a bit more detail. For
example, what pattern does the lines you want start? “All lines before
theq” doesn't specify how it starts.
A better solution is to use search-forward-regexp to search the begin
pattern, mark, then search-forward-regexp again to search for the
ending pattern “theq() :”, then do search-backward-regexp to move
point to the beginning of “theq”. Then, grab the region.
here's some pieces of code (untested):
(let (p1 p2)
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(search-forward-regexp "^A.+$") ; begin pattern
(setq p1 (point)) ; save cursor pos
(search-forward-regexp "theq() :") ; ending pattern
(backward-char 8)
(setq p2 (point)) ; save cursor pos
(setq mytext (buffer-substring p1 p2))
)
)
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄