For example, if I type "foo spam" after the prompt of isearch-forward, how can I advice some functions in isearch.el to convert the string to "foo[.?:,!]?[ \n]spam" before search? Basically I want to search for the two adjacent words in the text. I know I can use isearch-forward-regexp to do that, but it's painful and error-prone to type out the regexp directly and I have many strings of that kind to search. I tried to understand code in isearch.el but failed. hope some Emacs gurus could help me out. Thanks.
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2 Answers
You may be interested in isearch-toggle-word (M-s w) during your incremental search.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Word-Search.html
This will search for individual words ignoring punctuation, spaces and line ends.
1 Comment
RNA
+1. I didn't know
M-s w can search multiple words. However, I still think preprocess the input string for isearch is still valuable because it would provide a general solution to a wider kinds of problems. For example, even in this situation, what if one want to see two adjacent words in one sentence (without punctuations).Here's a rough crack at it:
(defun isearch-transform-string ()
(interactive)
(let* ((string (replace-regexp-in-string
"foo" "bar" isearch-string)))
(setq isearch-string string
isearch-message (mapconcat 'isearch-text-char-description string ""))
(isearch-search-and-update)))
(define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-t") 'isearch-transform-string)
I think you have to bind it to a key in isearch-mode-map; I don't think M-x works quite right in isearch-mode.
If you require more power, there is a variable isearch-search-fun-function, which you can set to a function that returns a function. The returned function is used to find the next match.
1 Comment
RNA
the first solution works but not ideal. I tried the second one but have an error, which I posted as another question: stackoverflow.com/questions/16333324/…
