Re: search across linebreaks

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 17.02.2013 08:43, schrieb Eric Abrahamsen:
> I'm going to need to do a large scale search-and-replace on a series of
> text files, using a sort of dictionary or hash-table of search terms and
> their replacement. The text files are filled to the usual fill column.
> The search terms may be broken across linebreaks, and I'm not sure of
> the best way to handle this. If it was regular English words I could
> probably manage a programmatic version of `isearch-toggle-word', but in
> this case these are solid strings, and might be broken anywhere.
>
> The two solutions I can think of are: 1) break up the characters in the
> search string and insert "\n?" between each one to create regexps to
> search on, and 2) unfill the whole file at the start of the procedure
> and then refill it afterwards. Neither of these seems like a great
> idea -- does anyone have any brighter ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Eric

IMO Emacs Lisp is much better suited for that kind of tasks than sed, awk, Perl 
etc.
That's because you can cascade matching conditions nearly to infinite, while 
jumping around in buffer,
that way break complex regexps up, avoid them.

Write a function which first takes your files list

than

(while files-list

(while (re-search-forward 1nd-condition)
(while (re-search-forward 2nd-condition)

...

do-what-its-needed)))