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I am dabbling in Emacs Lisp and I am trying to write the following function:

(defun buffer-file-name-body ()
  (last (split-string (buffer-file-name) "/")))

What I am trying to achieve is to extract just the file name and extension from the full path given by (buffer-file-name). However, this implementation returns a list of one item ("scratch.el") ... I tried several things such as passing the result of (last) through (string) but that raises an error... Google did not return anything useful when I searched for Emacs List convert list to string. How to I do this?

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    do you mean you have a list '("scranch.el") and you need to extract "scratch.el" from it? Commented Jul 12, 2012 at 5:14
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    Yes, that is correct... would a simple CAR suffice? Commented Jul 12, 2012 at 5:17
  • Yes, it does I just tested it Commented Jul 12, 2012 at 5:18
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    Please post the solution as an answer and accept it. Thanks. Commented Jul 12, 2012 at 5:47
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    You might want to check out the built-in function file-name-nondirectory. (Also, if you allow me the small hint, your function will barf on buffers that do not visit a file, such as e.g., *scratch*.) Commented Jul 12, 2012 at 6:15

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It sounds to me like what you want is (file-name-nondirectory (buffer-file-name)) which returns the simple file name, sans any directory information, as a string.

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6 Comments

Although the original question was around converting a List to a String and CAR would be a good solution, using (file-name-nondirectory) applies better to this situation and is the cleanner solution...
@HowardWest Hey mate, nice piggy backing on my comment above. Please note again that (buffer-file-name) returns nil for buffers not visiting a file, and that file-name-nondirectory cannot handle a nil argument.
@Thomas If you answer the question, I will give you accepted answer for it... :)
@JonasGorauskas Ah, don't worry about it. I honestly think it's not even the correct answer to your actual question, because it doesn't tell you how to extract a string value from a list. It might have been what you were after, but it doesn't answer what you asked about. If anything, fvwmer should get the credit since he gave the correct answer to that.
I took this to be the question: "What I am trying to achieve is to extract just the file name and extension from the full path given by (buffer-file-name)"
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