Editing a string with lots of escape characters

Question

Let's say I'm editing my config file and there is a very long string like this:

(setq my-string "very\nlong\nstring [...] \"hello world\"")

How do edit the string without the escape characters (and maybe in a different mode) and than save the result back in the config file with the escape characters?

T. Verron · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-08T12:56:23.497

9

You can use the package string-edit for that purpose.

Essentially, it does exactly what you want: simply call string-edit-at-point to edit the string at point, then C-c C-c to return to the original buffer.

The documentation on github includes a demonstration (if the link appears to be dead, please see the github page directly).

edited Nov 08 '15 at 12:56

answered Dec 06 '14 at 14:23

T. Verron

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Your demonstration link goes to a parked domain. – Geremia Nov 08 '15 at 06:32
Apparently the link on the github page was changed, I updated the answer. – T. Verron Nov 08 '15 at 12:57

Editing a string with lots of escape characters

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