this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Regex Find in files (non-interactive) (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by telenieko@alien.top to c/emacs@communick.news
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Hi there,

I use orgmode links extensively. In particular, I have hundreds (our thousands) of links to emails (in notmuch). I would very much like to add a tag to any email that is being referenced from org.

So, what I need to do first is be able to find all matches of a regular expression in all my org files. Non-interactively.

I have been playing around with xref-matches-in-directory but that would not cover when multiple emails are mentioned in the same line...

I have been looking and looking but everything I find missed the non-interactive part.

So: What is the function to "search for this REGEX in FILES in DIR and return the first capture group"? (the regex has a capture group for the msgid)

The regex:

  (rx-to-string
   (rx "notmuch:id:"
       (group (1+ (not "]")))))
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[–] yantar92@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can simply loop over all the org files, open one by one, and search within each file individually using (while (re-seacrch-forward ...) ...).

[–] telenieko@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I plan on searching hundreds of files (all notes) so... some way that does not open all of them would be preferable.

[–] yantar92@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

If opening a file is a problem, you can create temporary buffer and then use insert-file-contents + search + erase-buffer.