Question

I have a bunch of C integer array initialisation code, e.g.

int a[] = {11,22,33,44};

that I would like to change to strings, e.g.

char *a[] = {"11","22","33","44"};

Is there a reg exp I can use to do this? e.g.

M-x replace-regexp RET
Replace regexp: [0-9] RET
Replace regexp with: "[0-9]" RET

Answer 1

You can do the following:

M-x query-replace-regexp
Query replace regexp: \([0-9]+\)
Query replace regexp \([0-9]+\) with: "\1"

[0-9]+ matches one or more consecutive digits. The escaped parentheses, \( and \), make the contents a group. The \1 in the replacement string is replaced with whatever was matched between the first set of escaped parentheses in the query.

Thanks to choroba for the reminder in the comments that you can usually use C-M-% for query-replace-regexp.