Emacs regexp - replacing text strings, query replace regexp

Question

It seems simple enough but I can't get it done. My text file looks like this :

Johnson Cary, 2009, This important article, 109 pages.

Smith Tom, 2003, Much ado about nothing: a study, 89 pages.

I need this :

Johnson Cary%2009%This important article%109 pages.

Any special character unlikely to appear in text will do. The end goal is to end up with a .csv then a .xls file.

I am using

^\([^,]+\)\([,]\)

to find the first occuring comma but when I try to replace with

 \1 %

it does not work, nor any kind of close combination of that sort for that matter.

Any help will be dearly welcome!

Thank you much in advance.

That wouldn't replace more than one comma, but it works just fine for the first one. In what way is it not working for you? Note that this may not be a safe approach (are escaped/quoted commas permitted in the data in any format?). — phils
– phils, Commented Oct 16, 2014 at 22:41
A tip when working with regexps is to build them with a visual feedback: wikemacs.org/wiki/Regexp — Ehvince
– Ehvince, Commented Oct 17, 2014 at 9:50

jlahd · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-16 22:37:37Z

1

Replace this:

^\([^,]*\), \([^,]*\), \([^,]*\), \(.*\)$

with this:

\1%\2%\3%\4

to get the correct result.

answered Oct 16, 2014 at 22:37

jlahd

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1 Comment

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