2

One can find here various ways to remove all duplicate lines in Emacs by preserving the first occurrence. Also Emacs 24.4 introduces the command delete-duplicate-lines.

I am wondering if there is a similar way to to delete all duplicate words by preserving the first occurrence of each words.

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  • If you can format your document one word per line, you'd solve the problem. Can you share more details on how the original document is formatted? – wvxvw Aug 2 '15 at 12:53
  • @wvxvw The original text is a very big text file (no particular structure). If there is a simple function which formats the document one word per line I would be glad to learn about it. – Name Aug 2 '15 at 13:19
  • @Name You can use query-replace to replace spaces with newlines and then delete-duplicate-lines. I am assuming that this document is just a list of words. Because if the document has proper meaningful sentences, they will get butchered. – Kaushal Modi Aug 2 '15 at 13:53
  • @kaushalmodi thank you for this simple idea. – Name Aug 2 '15 at 14:41
  • If there is a direct solution without introducing new lines I would be interested. – Name Aug 2 '15 at 14:42
3

The following command (minimally-tested) will collect all of the words in the buffer and display the unique ones (ignoring case) in a new buffer.

(defun show-unique-words (&optional alphabetical)
  "Collect all of the unique words in the current buffer and
display them in a new buffer.  With prefix, alphabetize the
list."
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((buf (buffer-name))
        (new (get-buffer-create "*Unique Words*"))
        (txt (delete-dups (mapcar #'downcase
                                  (split-string (buffer-string)
                                                nil nil
                                                "[^[:alnum:]]+")))))
    (with-current-buffer new
      (delete-region (point-min) (point-max))
      (insert (format "%d unique words in the <%s> buffer:\n\n"
                      (length txt) buf))
      (cl-dolist (word (if alphabetical (sort txt #'string<) txt))
        (insert (concat word "\n"))))
    (pop-to-buffer new)))
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  • Thanks I confirm that your works. I should mention that it is a little bit slow. The above comment of @kaushalmodi (a solution suggesting to replace the space with newlines then using delete-duplicate-lines) seems to be faster. But your function can be use to do other thing (e.g. sorting alphabetically). – Name Aug 2 '15 at 17:24
  • By the way let me ask a question. When using your function interactively (with M-x) how to pass the argument alphabetical to show-unique-words. Using M-x show-unique-words doesn't sort alphabetically. I cannot figure out how to pass this argument to this command. – Name Aug 2 '15 at 17:39
  • 1
    @Name: you can pass the prefix argument to the command with C-u M-x show-unique-words. Have a look at the manual and wiki page on the prefix argument for more information. – Dan♦ Aug 2 '15 at 18:50
  • "a little bit slow" - delete-dups is O(n²), using a hash-table to find duplicates (like delete-duplicate-lines does) would probably be faster for large inputs. – npostavs Aug 2 '15 at 19:27

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