2013-09-18 Selective replacement in LaTeX documents (en)

A few days ago, I was working on a LaTeX file written by a someone. The person who typed it in didn’t care about putting dollar signs around single-letter formulae, so that there were parts like “Let $x\in A$.”, but also “Let A be a nonempty set.”. No need to mention that it is rather tedious to correct these kind of errors – but Emacs to the rescue, I thought. Now most such occurences were the sets A through C and variables x to z, so I thought I could be clever (especially after reading this excellent post from Mastering Emacs about \, in regexp-replace) and tried to regexp-replace \b\([A-Cx-z]\)\b with \,(if (texmathp) \1 (concat "$" \1 "$")). To my surprise, it didn’t work: it started replacing things with weird strings. After a bit of searching I found the culprit: AUCTeX’s texmathp isn’t a pure function – it does some searching on its own, so \1 gets cluttered. The solution was quick and dirty: \,(let ((letter \1)) (if (texmathp) letter (concat "$" letter "$"))); after a while, I realized that \,(if (save-match-data (texmathp)) \1 (concat "$" \1 "$")) is much better. Anyway, I wrote an email to Carsten Dominik, who is the author of the relevant portion of AUCTeX, and asked him to add a save-match-data to texmathp itself. It quickly turned out that this behavior is actually a feature, not a bug, since Emacs functions (even interactive ones) aren’t required to save match data. I don’t like it, but this is what it is; a possible solution might be advising texmathp, and a cleaner policy might be to have two functions: an “internal” one, not saving the match data, and an interactive wrapper with save-match-data. Anyway, I have to make it clear that this is Emacs’ core developers’ policy, not one of Carsten’s! And now that I know about it, it’s no longer a huge problem for me.

What can be learned from this experience? First of all, if not for the save-match-data problem, I’d pull this trick off in just a few minutes, including searching for texmathp. Second: don’t get me wrong, but you know, I’m not a Vim expert, but I’m just wondering whether it’s possible to do something like that in it. (Maybe yes, maybe not. Just wondering. And if yes, then how much time you would need to code it.). Third, when I got suspicious about texmathp messing around with match data, confirming this was a matter of seconds due to the self-documenting nature of Emacs: the source was just a few keystrokes away. And last but not least: my email exchange with Carsten was yet another example of the Emacs community being an extremely friendly and supportive one – especially towards a relative newbie like me.

It’s so good to be an Emacs user.

CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryTeX, CategoryLaTeX