I am trying to handle some data my little emacs helper program retrieves.
This is what the data structure look like:
#("[[id:b6f64bd1-3bf8-4a15-ad50-46bc5d5d1c94][Subsub1]]" 43 50 (fontified nil line-prefix #("**" 0 2 (face org-indent)) wrap-prefix #("***** " 0 2 (face org-indent) 2 6 (face org-indent)) face org-level-1 org-category "dummy")))
I am interested in getting the first element, i.e. the string "[[...]]".
Letting some functions investigate the data, does not really reveal the trick:
;; initiailize helper var
(setq dummy #("[[id:b6f64bd1-3bf8-4a15-ad50-46bc5d5d1c94][Subsub1]]" 43 50 (fontified nil line-prefix #("**" 0 2 (face org-indent)) wrap-prefix #("***** " 0 2 (face org-indent) 2 6 (face org-indent)) face org-level-1 org-category "dummy")))
;; check type
(type-of dummy) ;; => string (for some reason unknown)
;; check length
(length dummy) ;; => 52 (#o64, #x34, ?4)
;; get substring
(seq-subseq dummy 45 52) ;; => #("bsub1]]" 0 5 (fontified nil line-prefix #("**" 0 2 (face org-indent)) wrap-prefix #("***** " 0 2 (face org-indent) 2 6 (face org-indent)) face org-level-1 org-category "dummy"))
(seq-subseq dummy 50 52) ;; => "]]"
All this does not really make sense to me. From documentation, I'd assume that the construct `#(..." determines some vector.
But (seq-elt dummy 0) would not return the string I am looking for.
Can someone please provide some hint about this string datatype or even some direction about how to retrieve the first element of the data structure.
Unlike Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp doesn't use #(...) for vectors, it uses [...].
In Emacs Lisp, there is a #( syntax for strings:
#("characters" property-data...)
It does look as if the data you are retrieving might be of this form. There is a manual section on working with strings with text properties.
I see there is a propertize function which converts a regular string to one with properties.
Use the substring-no-properties function to extract plain string data from it, without properties.