Re: multiple search strings in query-replace-regexp

[David Kastrup]

Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org> writes:

> [A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
> David Kastrup 
> <dak@gnu.org>],

I already told you to leave off "complimentary copies" to group
articles: they are a breach of netiquette since they add no valuable
information at all and tend to confuse the recipient into having to
reply multiple times: once in mail, and later, when the mistake has
been noticed, on the group again.

Please stop this nuisance.  You can expect that people writing on
Usenet groups are also reading there.

> who wrote in article <85ejtlyuhv.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>:
>> >> C-M-% \(foo\)\|\(rock\)\|metal RET
>> >> \,(cond (\1 "bar") (\2 "house") ("goa")) RET
>> >
>> > To make it useful, one needs a function to count the number of
>> > parentheses in a given regular expression.  Is there?
>
>> Uh WHAT?  You just type the above stuff.  Why would that not be
>> useful?
>
> How many people do you know who would type something like this?  :-(

Well, enough for the idiom to be useful.  That's why it was invented
and documented.

> And to have a "generally usable" wrapper, one needs a way to
> identify how many paren groups are inside your "foo" and "rock"
> regular expressions.

I can't actually think of a user interface for such a wrapper that
would not really complicate things.  In particular if you want to
refer to matched groups in the replacements, it is pretty hard to come
up with anything close to a useful interface.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum