Why do replace commands sometimes not work?

[MBR]

There's a problem I've encountered with Emacs for many years.  I never reported it because I've been running Emacs 21.3 under Windows, and I figured that Emacs users on Windows are probably a very small percentage of Emacs users, and that 21.3 is so old that it nobody would be interested in debugging the problem.

But then I encountered the same problem with Emacs 23.2.1 running under Linux.  And a few days ago I finally installed Windows Emacs 23.4.1, and it's got the same problem.

The problem: the replace commands, M-x replace-string and M-x replace-regexp, sometimes work and sometimes don't.  When it doesn't work, it often will work if I retype exactly the same command a few times.

My reaction when I first encountered the problem was that I must have mistyped the command the first time.  But I've encountered it for so many years that whenever it fails to work the first time, it's become habit for me to be extremely careful in my typing the second and subsequent times, and it  often fails on those tries too, but eventually succeeds.

I particularly notice it when I'm defining a macro [ delimited by C-x ( and C-x ) ].  And frequently I have the buffer narrowed to a small subset of text that I want to operate on.  But I don't know for certain that defining a macro or having the buffer narrowed are what cause the problem to manifest.

I now have a concrete example of this that proves that it's not due to my mistyping.  There's a point in the macro where the buffer has been narrowed to a portion  that contains a symbol in CamelCase.

Note: In case you're unfamiliar with CamelCase, it's a convention for variable names originally popularized by the X Window System.  Earlier conventions for C and C++ used "_" as a word delimiter within variable names.  Lisp used "-" instead of "_".  CamelCase, so-called because the capital letters in the middle of the word form humps like those on a camel's back, uses capital letters to indicate the beginning of a new word.  So, the C-style variable name find_char_in_string, or Lisp-style variable name find-char-in-string, in CamelCase is findCharInString.

The purpose of this part of the macro is to turn CamelCase into space-separated words.

M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
M-x replace-regexp RET
[A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
C-d                    ;; Delete the unwanted space before the first letter

So, if the narrowed portion of the buffer contains:

"JohnJacobJingleheimerschmidt"

after running this portion of the macro, it should contain:

"John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"

Instead, when run in Emacs 23, the result is:

"ohnJacobJingleheimerschmidt"

which is exactly what you'd expect if the M-x replace-regexp failed to do the replacement that it should have.  But since I know that sometimes a replace command works the second time after failing to work the first time, I modified that portion of the macro to do the replace twice:

M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
M-x replace-regexp RET
[A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
M-x replace-regexp RET
[A-Z] RET              ;; Find any capital letter
C-q SPC \& RET         ;; Replace it with a space followed by itself
M-<                    ;; Go to beginning of narrowed buffer
C-d                    ;; Delete the unwanted space before the first letter

Now, if the replace were working the first time, applying it again would produce the undesired result:

" John  Jacob  Jingleheimerschmidt"

Instead, it produces:

"John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"

Does anybody here have any idea what's going wrong here?

Mark Rosenthal
m...@arlsoft.com

P.S. - One further clue: In the older version of Emacs (21.3) I've noticed that at those times when the replace fails to work, if I repeat the replace command with C-x ESC ESC, the minibuffer shows:

(replace-regexp "[A-Z]" " \\&" nil sss eee)

where sss and eee are integers that are supposed to indicate the beginning and end characters of the region to operate on, but when the replace has failed, sss and eee specify a small subset of the region.

[MBR]

On 5/24/2012 10:41 PM, B. T. Raven wrote:

I can't reproduce that misbehavior on w32 ver 23.1
Both in *scratch* (lisp mode) and a junk file in text mode I get:

John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
" John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
" John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
 John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
 John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt

where the second and third lines were originally camel-case in quotes.
I did assign the macro to a keychord with C-xC-kb

Ed

I'm not surprised that you can't reproduce it.  It's so unpredictable that it reminds me of an assembly language bug I diagnosed many years ago where the code turned out to be making a critical decision based on data it fetched from an uninitialized memory location.  In the case of this bug, the state of memory could depend on every keystroke I've typed since I started Emacs, the contents of every file it's opened, etc.

The example I gave was to illustrate the sort of problem I'm running into, to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem.  I'd be thrilled if I could come up with a reproducible example, but I've had no luck on that front so far.

Mark

[MBR]

Sorry to bother the whole list with this, but it's the only way I can get a message through to "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net>.

"B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> responded on this list to my question about Emacs replace functions sometimes not working.  But when I tried to respond to his email, my response bounced with:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  ni...@nihilo.net
    SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<ni...@nihilo.net>:
    host mailserver.nihilo.net [213.171.216.114]:
    550 <ni...@nihilo.net>: Recipient address rejected:
    User unknown in virtual mailbox table

In case ni...@nihilo.net is reading this list, do you have any idea why your mailserver is rejecting emails addressed to you?  Is there an alternate email address I can mail you at?

Mark Rosenthal
m...@arlsoft.com

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 25.05.2012 um 05:19 schrieb MBR:

> Sorry to bother the whole list with this, but it's the only way I can get a message through to "B. T. Raven"

I think on this list we are supposed to respond to all, to the whole list and to the author of the referenced eMail.

--
Greetings

Pete

How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
None.
They just redefine "dark" as the new standard.

[Ludwig, Mark]

I assume something like Valgrind has been applied to Emacs … and it’s clean.

 

Cheers,

Mark

[B. T. Raven]

Sorry, mbr and Pete. I'm a little paranoid about usenet. I've sent mbr
my real email.

Ed

[Barry Margolin]

In article <5O-dnbLCNdm5bCPS...@giganews.com>,
"B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:

> Die Thu May 24 2012 18:15:40 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) MBR
> <m...@arlsoft.com> scripsit:

> > m...@arlsoft.com <mailto:m...@arlsoft.com>

> >
> > P.S. - One further clue: In the older version of Emacs (21.3) I've
> > noticed that at those times when the replace fails to work, if I repeat
> > the replace command with C-x ESC ESC, the minibuffer shows:
> >
> > (replace-regexp "[A-Z]" " \\&" nil sss eee)
> >
> > where sss and eee are integers that are supposed to indicate the
> > beginning and end characters of the region to operate on, but when the
> > replace has failed, sss and eee specify a small subset of the region.
> >
>
>

> I can't reproduce that misbehavior on w32 ver 23.1
> Both in *scratch* (lisp mode) and a junk file in text mode I get:
>
> John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
> " John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
> " John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt"
> John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
> John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt
>
> where the second and third lines were originally camel-case in quotes.
> I did assign the macro to a keychord with C-xC-kb

I think the clue is in his P.S. If you have transient-mark-mode
enabled, the replace commands restrict themselves to the active region.

When I run M-ESC ESC in Emacs 22.2, it doesn't show explicit buffer
positions, it show things like (if (and transient-mark-mode mark-active)
(region-beginning)). But maybe in the older version it just put the
buffer positions in the history.

--
Barry Margolin, bar...@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***