Re: How to reliably edit a file from within Emacs Lisp and return a string?

[Jean Louis]

* Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> [2019-08-23 16:15]:
> >>>>> On Fri, 23 Aug 2019 16:01:45 +0200, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> said:
>     Jean> I would be happy if I can do something like:
> 
>     Jean> (defun emacsclient-edit (file)
>     Jean>   (shell-command (format "emacsclient %s " file))
>     Jean>   (file-to-string file))
> 
>     Jean> But that does not work within Emacs itself. Would that work, I 
> would be fine.
> 
>     Jean> It is somehow strange that I can run emacsclient from outside
>     Jean> Emacs and edit file and know that emacsclient finished its job,
>     Jean> and read the string from file, and that I cannot do the same from
>     Jean> Emacs.
> 
> Iʼd investigate the 'with-editor' package, which lets you use
> emacsclient to talk back to the emacs itʼs run from.

I tried it, as I understand that package is preparing the environment
$EDITOR for shell commands, so that it is ensured that editor will
communicate to current Emacs instance. For example launching external
mail reader that uses $EDITOR variable would use existing Emacs
instance with emacsclient

Jean