How to get selected text in Emacs Lisp?

Question

I need to get selection as a string in my Emacs Lisp function.

score 20 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

20

Selected text is called region in Emacs universe. See How do I access the contents of the current region in Emacs Lisp?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

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answered Feb 08 '10 at 04:15

Pavel Chuchuva

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score 12 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 15 '20 at 17:48

The accepted answer pointed me to the right answer. I want to leave this piece of code for more ELisp beginners like me. regionp contains the "selection" (known as region in ELisp) as a variable in the ELisp function. The if condition checks if the region is active.

(defun get-selected-text (start end)
  (interactive "r")
    (if (use-region-p)
        (let ((regionp (buffer-substring start end)))
            (message regionp))))

How to get selected text in Emacs Lisp?

2 Answers2