NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/gnu/emacs/help/4818

Text File | 1992-11-17 | 1.7 KB | 49 lines

Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!times!wmesard
From: [e-mail] (Wayne Mesard)
Subject: Re: Locate long lines
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Mon, 16 Nov 92 14:24:02 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Distributed Systems Group, Stanford University
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: 16 Nov 92 12:53:19
Lines: 36

[e-mail] (H.Thiemann) writes:
> How do I locate a line longer than n Characters?

Hmmm, I thought Emacs' regular expressions had a {m,n} directive like
SunOS' grep(1).  Guess not.  That would have made the following solution
a bit less ugly.  But it does what you want.

The basic idea is to build a regular expression that says "a line N
characters or more" and then use it to search.  All the other junk I
threw in there is just to make it look intimidating :-)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  (defun length-search-forward (len)
    "Search forward for a line of LEN characters.  LEN is prompted for unless
  a prefix argument was specified, in which case that is used.  If it is
  negative, then the line must be exactly -LEN characters long.  Otherwise,
  any line LEN or more characters matches."
    (interactive "NFind line of length: ")
    (let ((abslen (if (< len 0) (- len) len)))
      (condition-case nil
      (progn
        (re-search-forward
         (concat "^"
             (make-string abslen ?.)
             (if (< len 0) "$")
             ))
        (beginning-of-line))
    (error (error "Line of %d%s characters not found" abslen
              (if (< len 0) "" " or more"))
           ))
      ))

--
Wayne();
[e-mail]