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I'm a beginner in Emacs and Elisp, but do have programming experience.

My question is quite straightforward, I want to have a command open-git that when in a git directory, it opens the url inside a browser.

I have the following code

(defun open-git ()
  "Opens the git repository in a browser."
  (interactive)
  (browse-url (replace-regexp-in-string
               "git@\\(.*\\):\\(.*\\)/\\(.*\\).git", ; Regex
                "https://\\1/\\2/\\3.git/", ; Replacement
                (shell-command-to-string "git remote get-url origin")) ; String
              )
  )

The git repository url is in a ssh format, meaning for browse-url to work correctly, I have to regex replace it. I have used M-x regexp-builder to confirm it matches correctly. However, when trying to execute the command from a file buffer, it gives me the error Symbol's function definition is void: \,. Reading up on it, I saw that \, is used to run regex interactively for the replacement. But I'm not using \,, is it being used internally?

On a git url that is for example [email protected]:foo/bar.git the matches are:

  1. github.com
  2. foo
  3. bar

Obviously I can just set the git url to the https version and be done with it. But I also just want to understand Emacs and Elisp better, so figured this was a nice easy exercise.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Remove the commas after the regex and the replacement

(defun open-git ()
  "Opens the git repository in a browser."
  (interactive)
  (browse-url (replace-regexp-in-string
               "git@\\(.*\\):\\(.*\\)/\\(.*\\).git" ; Regex
                "https://\\1/\\2/\\3.git/" ; Replacement
                (shell-command-to-string "git remote get-url origin")))) ; String
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  • OML, was that the issue? Thank you so much! I would expect Flycheck or similar to highlight it as a syntax issue.
    – Stroopwafel
    Commented Feb 10 at 12:52
  • 1
    Commas are valid syntax in elisp, but not for separating list items. The byte-compiler does complain about your original code: "Warning: the function ‘,’ is not known to be defined." (which makes sense if you understand that the lisp reader is producing the likes of (\, "https://\\1/\\2/\\3.git/") from your code (which in turn is because of the way that commas are expected to be used, within backquoted forms).
    – phils
    Commented Feb 10 at 23:53
  • N.b. The interactive regexp replacement case (introduced in Emacs 22.1) is something different -- for that case \, was simply selected as the syntax for evaluating the following expression as lisp code in order to be a syntactic analogue of the pre-existing use of a comma for evaluating the following expression within a backquoted form (with the latter being what you were effectively running into here).
    – phils
    Commented Feb 11 at 0:08
  • 1
    Your take-away is probably that if you ever see errors mentioning commas, the first thing to do is check whether you've accidentally used them as list separators :)
    – phils
    Commented Feb 11 at 0:13
  • I suppose my experience with other languages is what was my downfall with this, I will keep in mind that lists should not be separated with commas in lisp
    – Stroopwafel
    Commented Feb 11 at 14:14

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