35.4 Regular Expression Searching

In GNU Emacs, you can search for the next match for a regular expression (see Syntax of Regular Expressions) either incrementally or not. For incremental search commands, see Regular Expression Search in The GNU Emacs Manual. Here we describe only the search functions useful in programs. The principal one is re-search-forward.

These search functions convert the regular expression to multibyte if the buffer is multibyte; they convert the regular expression to unibyte if the buffer is unibyte. See Text Representations.

Command: re-search-forward regexp &optional limit noerror count ¶

This function searches forward in the current buffer for a string of text that is matched by the regular expression regexp. The function skips over any amount of text that is not matched by regexp, and leaves point at the end of the first match found. It returns the new value of point.

If limit is non-nil, it must be a position in the current buffer. It specifies the upper bound to the search. No match extending after that position is accepted. If limit is omitted or nil, it defaults to the end of the accessible portion of the buffer.

What re-search-forward does when the search fails depends on the value of noerror:

nil

Signal a search-failed error.

t

Do nothing and return nil.

anything else

Move point to limit (or the end of the accessible portion of the buffer) and return nil.

The argument noerror only affects valid searches which fail to find a match. Invalid arguments cause errors regardless of noerror.

If count is a positive number n, the search is done n times; each successive search starts at the end of the previous match. If all these successive searches succeed, the function call succeeds, moving point and returning its new value. Otherwise the function call fails, with results depending on the value of noerror, as described above. If count is a negative number -n, the search is done n times in the opposite (backward) direction.

In the following example, point is initially before the ‘T’. Evaluating the search call moves point to the end of that line (between the ‘t’ of ‘hat’ and the newline).

---------- Buffer: foo ----------
I read "∗The cat in the hat
comes back" twice.
---------- Buffer: foo ----------

(re-search-forward "[a-z]+" nil t 5)
     ⇒ 27

---------- Buffer: foo ----------
I read "The cat in the hat∗
comes back" twice.
---------- Buffer: foo ----------

Command: re-search-backward regexp &optional limit noerror count ¶

This function searches backward in the current buffer for a string of text that is matched by the regular expression regexp, leaving point at the beginning of the first text found.

This function is analogous to re-search-forward, but they are not simple mirror images. re-search-forward finds the match whose beginning is as close as possible to the starting point. If re-search-backward were a perfect mirror image, it would find the match whose end is as close as possible. However, in fact it finds the match whose beginning is as close as possible (and yet ends before the starting point). The reason for this is that matching a regular expression at a given spot always works from beginning to end, and starts at a specified beginning position.

A true mirror-image of re-search-forward would require a special feature for matching regular expressions from end to beginning. It’s not worth the trouble of implementing that.

Function: string-match regexp string &optional start inhibit-modify ¶

This function returns the index of the start of the first match for the regular expression regexp in string, or nil if there is no match. If start is non-nil, the search starts at that index in string.

For example,

(string-match
 "quick" "The quick brown fox jumped quickly.")
     ⇒ 4

(string-match
 "quick" "The quick brown fox jumped quickly." 8)
     ⇒ 27

The index of the first character of the string is 0, the index of the second character is 1, and so on.

By default, if this function finds a match, the index of the first character beyond the match is available as (match-end 0). See The Match Data. If inhibit-modify is non-nil, the match data isn’t modified.

(string-match
 "quick" "The quick brown fox jumped quickly." 8)
     ⇒ 27

(match-end 0)
     ⇒ 32

Function: string-match-p regexp string &optional start ¶

This predicate function does what string-match does, but it avoids modifying the match data.

Function: looking-at regexp &optional inhibit-modify ¶

This function determines whether the text in the current buffer directly following point matches the regular expression regexp. “Directly following” means precisely that: the search is “anchored” and it can succeed only starting with the first character following point. The result is t if so, nil otherwise.

This function does not move point, but it does update the match data (if inhibit-modify is nil or missing, which is the default). See The Match Data. As a convenience, instead of using the inhibit-modify argument, you can use looking-at-p, described below.

In this example, point is located directly before the ‘T’. If it were anywhere else, the result would be nil.

---------- Buffer: foo ----------
I read "∗The cat in the hat
comes back" twice.
---------- Buffer: foo ----------

(looking-at "The cat in the hat$")
     ⇒ t

Function: looking-back regexp limit &optional greedy ¶

This function returns t if regexp matches the text immediately before point (i.e., ending at point), and nil otherwise.

Because regular expression matching works only going forward, this is implemented by searching backwards from point for a match that ends at point. That can be quite slow if it has to search a long distance. You can bound the time required by specifying a non-nil value for limit, which says not to search before limit. In this case, the match that is found must begin at or after limit. Here’s an example:

---------- Buffer: foo ----------
I read "∗The cat in the hat
comes back" twice.
---------- Buffer: foo ----------

(looking-back "read \"" 3)
     ⇒ t
(looking-back "read \"" 4)
     ⇒ nil

If greedy is non-nil, this function extends the match backwards as far as possible, stopping when a single additional previous character cannot be part of a match for regexp. When the match is extended, its starting position is allowed to occur before limit.

As a general recommendation, try to avoid using looking-back wherever possible, since it is slow. For this reason, there are no plans to add a looking-back-p function.

Function: looking-at-p regexp ¶

This predicate function works like looking-at, but without updating the match data.

Variable: search-spaces-regexp ¶

If this variable is non-nil, it should be a regular expression that says how to search for whitespace. In that case, any group of spaces in a regular expression being searched for stands for use of this regular expression. However, spaces inside of constructs such as ‘[…]’ and ‘*’, ‘+’, ‘?’ are not affected by search-spaces-regexp.

Since this variable affects all regular expression search and match constructs, you should bind it temporarily for as small as possible a part of the code, and only where the Lisp code affected by the binding performs searches whose regexp was produced from interactive user input. In other words, this variable should only be used to tell regexp search primitives how to interpret whitespace typed by the user.