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I need to execute a regular expression with case conversion in a entire project. If I run query-replace-regexp in a single file informing '\([A-Z]+\)' and '\,(downcase \1)', it works as expected. But when I try that with projectile-replace-regexp I get the following error:

Invalid use of ‘\’ in replacement text

I investigated it a bit and it seems that the elisp expression doesn't work when query-replace-regexp is not called interactively, because if I run M-: (replace-regexp "'\\([A-Z_]+'\\)" "'\\,(downcase \\1)") I also have the error above.

Am I doing something wrong or is this some limitation? If so, is there another way to achieve this?

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  • The doc string of query-replace-regexp says "In interactive calls, the replacement text can contain ‘\,’ followed by a Lisp expression. Each replacement evaluates that expression to compute the replacement string. Inside of that expression, ‘\&’ is a string denoting the whole match as a string, ‘\N’ for a partial match, ‘\#&’ and ‘\#N’ for the whole or a partial match converted to a number with ‘string-to-number’, and ‘\#’ itself for the number of replacements done so far (starting with zero)."
    – Drew
    Apr 4, 2019 at 17:19
  • And the doc string of replace-regexp says "This function is for interactive use only; in Lisp code use re-search-forward and replace-match instead."
    – Drew
    Apr 4, 2019 at 17:19
  • If the projectile command does not allow the query-replace-regexp behavior then maybe consider filing an enhancement request with its maintainer.
    – Drew
    Apr 4, 2019 at 17:21
  • @Drew Just filed a bug report. I consider it as a bug if a function that has replace-regexp in its name and does not behave like it.
    – Tobias
    Apr 4, 2019 at 22:23

1 Answer 1

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The question is related to another question about non-interactive calls of query-replace-regexp. If they cannot use query-replace-read-args in projectile-replace-regexp they should at least apply query-replace-compile-replacement to the TO argument of tags-query-replace.

The following advice of projectile-replace-regexp does that for you.

(defun my-tags-query-replace-compile-replacement (fun &rest args)
  "Apply `q-r-compile-replacement' to `tags-query-replace' in FUN with ARGS."
  (cl-letf* ((old-tags-query-replace (symbol-function 'tags-query-replace))
         ((symbol-function 'tags-query-replace)
          (lambda (from to &rest other-args)
        (apply old-tags-query-replace
               from
               (query-replace-compile-replacement to t)
               other-args))))
    (apply fun args)))

(advice-add 'projectile-replace-regexp :around #'my-tags-query-replace-compile-replacement)

DISCLAIMER: Note that I do not have projectile installed. So I cannot test the code above. Please test it and report back the test results.

NOTE: I already filed a bug-report for the problem that projectile-replace-regexp does not have the interactive features of replace-regexp.

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  • It worked! Very nice solution. Thanks a lot!
    – Jesse
    Apr 5, 2019 at 12:30
  • @Jesse Do you have the possibility to comment on the bug report? It would be good to have an acknowledgement of the bug by a real projectile-user. This should be easy if you already have a github account. Ignore that comment if you do not have such an account.
    – Tobias
    Apr 5, 2019 at 12:35
  • Sure, no problem
    – Jesse
    Apr 5, 2019 at 12:58

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