I need to access the selection in Emacs buffer. I have found this article How do I access the contents of the current region in Emacs Lisp? and it helps me a lot.
But there is a problem. The first time I select (highlight) a region, it works okay, but when I press C-g, and move cursor normally to another place without highlighting any chars, I got a string from last mark to the current point while I expect an empty one.
Actually I need to implement a function which will return the current selection (highlighted) as a string, or empty string if nothing is highlighted. The following code may express me more clearly.
(defun get-search-term ()
(interactive)
(let (
(selection (buffer-substring-no-properties (region-beginning) (region-end))))
(if (= (length selection) 0)
(message "empty string")
(message selection))))
Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!
"r" specification of interactive is dumb. You're seeing why.
(defun get-search-term (beg end)
"message region or \"empty string\" if none highlighted"
(interactive (if (use-region-p)
(list (region-beginning) (region-end))
(list (point-min) (point-min))))
(let ((selection (buffer-substring-no-properties beg end)))
(if (= (length selection) 0)
(message "empty string")
(message selection))))
I don't mean "dumb" as in stupid and not useful; just that it doesn't care about whether the mark is active or not. I think it predates transient-mark-mode.
EDIT: Using (point-min) twice above makes the code harder to understand
when re-reading. Here is a better implementation:
(defun get-search-term (beg end)
"message region or \"empty string\" if none highlighted"
(interactive (if (use-region-p)
(list (region-beginning) (region-end))
(list nil nil)))
(message "%s" (if (and beg end)
(buffer-substring-no-properties beg end)
"empty string")))