Question

I am dabbling in Emacs Lisp and I am trying to write the following function:

(defun buffer-file-name-body ()
  (last (split-string (buffer-file-name) "/")))

What I am trying to achieve is to extract just the file name and extension from the full path given by (buffer-file-name). However, this implementation returns a list of one item ("scratch.el") … I tried several things such as passing the result of (last) through (string) but that raises an error… Google did not return anything useful when I searched for Emacs List convert list to string. How to I do this?

Answer 1

It sounds to me like what you want is (file-name-nondirectory (buffer-file-name)) which returns the simple file name, sans any directory information, as a string.