How to query-replace multiple matches!

Posted on 2022-08-06 by Tony Zorman

As its name suggests, Emacs’s query-replace function (bound to M-% by default) can be used to replace occurences of one string with another. In comparison to other tools that are used for similar purposes—(a subset of) keyboard macros and multiple-cursors—the whole process after entering the from and to strings is interactive all the way through: it’s very fast to step through the individual matches and decide on the spot whether one would like to replace them or not. Needless to say, I like query-replace a lot! In true Emacs fashion, the function also takes way too many arguments: among other things, it can operate on the current region, backwards, or only on things surrounded by words boundaries.

However, there is one crucial feature missing from its default functionality: the ability to create multiple from → to pairs. But this is Emacs, after all, which means that I can just write that query-replace-many function I’ve always wanted!

Motivation

Originally, my motivation came through work, where I write a lot of LaTeX. When polishing papers, it sometimes happens that I would like to change or unify the notation of certain objects in the current equation/environment/file.

When an alteration like this only encompasses a single action, like switching T to H, a simple query-replace after narrowing to the current region of interest is totally sufficient. For others, like changing T to H and S to G, this solution, along with multiple-cursors and other tools people usually go for, would already be unsatisfactory—the whole region would need to be traversed twice. Now imagine that you want to change T to U and U to T: chaos! Save having to give some sort of temporary name to one of the objects, which would be even slower, query-replace is quite useless in this situation. It’s possible to cook up a manual solution using the alternative query-replace-regexp function and capture groups, but I’m unsure how many people know their elisp regular expressions well enough for that to be time efficient. I don’t, and almost certainly never will, so it seemed much easier to automate this instead!

The Solution

Thankfully, since replace.el sports a decent API, writing a version of query-replace that accepts multiple arguments turns out to be easy enough. The high-level overview is this: we read in multiple queries until an empty input is given1, build up a regular expression of the form "\\(?:query-1\\|query-2\\|…\\)", and—when it comes to replacing—test the current thing to be replaced against all of the queries to select the correct one.

The beauty of this is that, since it’s really just a thin wrapper over two functions from replace.el that do the heavy lifting, all of the modules regular functionality, like the keybindings and history, just work.

For example, in the following I replace T with U and, at the same time, U with T. The first few matches are stepped through and the rest is just accepted wholesale. At the bottom, you can see the default query-replace interface when interacting with the query.

The only cosmetic imperfection of this is that, while the replacement candidate itself is correctly updated, we see the whole regular expression \(?U:\|T\) as the thing to be replaced instead of the bit that’s actually matching currently. However, since this would seem to require some work and one of course sees what’s to be replaced by looking at the thing at point, I can very much live with this for the moment.

The Code

Below is the full source code, in all of its hacky glory. Note that you will need to require the s.el and dash.el libraries for this to work, if you haven’t loaded these already (if you use any amount of packages at all, chances are that you have).

(defun slot/get-queries (&optional pairs)
  "Get multiple `query-replace' pairs from the user.
PAIRS is a list of replacement pairs of the form (FROM . TO)."
  (-let* (((from to delim arg)
           (query-replace-read-args
            (s-join " "
                    (-non-nil
                     (list "Query replace many"
                           (cond ((eq current-prefix-arg '-) "backward")
                                 (current-prefix-arg         "word"))
                           (when (use-region-p) "in region"))))
            nil))                       ; no regexp-flag
          (from-to (cons (regexp-quote from)
                         (s-replace "\\" "\\\\" to))))
    ;; HACK: Since the default suggestion of replace.el will be
    ;; the last one we've entered, an empty string will give us
    ;; exactly that.  Instead of trying to fight against this,
    ;; use it in order to signal an exit.
    (if (-contains? pairs from-to)
        (list pairs delim arg)
      (slot/get-queries (push from-to pairs)))))

(defun slot/query-replace-many
    (pairs &optional delimited start end backward region-noncontiguous-p)
  "Like `query-replace', but query for several replacements.
Query for replacement pairs until the users enters an empty
string (but see `slot/get-queries').

Refer to `query-replace' and `perform-replace' for what the other
arguments actually mean."
  (interactive
   (let ((common (slot/get-queries)))
     (list (nth 0 common) (nth 1 common)
           (if (use-region-p) (region-beginning))
           (if (use-region-p) (region-end))
           (nth 2 common)
           (if (use-region-p) (region-noncontiguous-p)))))
  (perform-replace
   (concat "\\(?:" (mapconcat #'car pairs "\\|") "\\)") ; build query
   (cons (lambda (pairs _count)
           (cl-loop for (from . to) in pairs
                    when (string-match from (match-string 0))
                    return to))
         pairs)
   :query :regexp
   delimited nil nil start end backward region-noncontiguous-p))

1. This isn’t quite what’s actually done, but it’s the right mental model to have (since this is how the function behaves). The gory details are that we use the fact that replace.el’s default suggestion is always the last query that was entered by the user. What happens on an empty input is quite deep in the bowels of query-replace-read-from. Since replacing these massive internal functions sounds like a real pain, leaning on that functionality suddenly appears much more reasonable. Thus, when we get back a query that has already been entered in one way or another, we bail out.↩︎