Re: Reading from a buffer

[Greg Hill]

The function 'buffer-substring-no-properties' is certainly a step in the
right direction, thank you. I've now got it down to:
(setq count (car (read-from-string (buffer-substring-no-properties (mark)
(point)))))
But I'm nothing short of astonished that there is not yet anything in
standard Emacs Lisp that is comparable to a formatted read-from-buffer
statement in a more conventional programming language like Fortran or C.
I'm imagining something akin to '(insert (format...' but working in the
opposite direction, something like '(unformat (read...'.  Perhaps I'll just
create my own library of intuitive and easy-to-use buffer I/O functions
since I expect to be doing quite a bit of this sort of thing in the future.