regexp-find-symbols Function

Summary

Returns a list of symbols that match a supplied regular expression.

Package

lispworks

Signature

regexp-find-symbols pattern &key case-sensitive packages test external-only => symbols

Arguments

Values

Description

The function regexp-find-symbols returns a list of symbols that match the regular expression in pattern.

pattern should be a precompiled-regexp or a string. If pattern is a string then regexp-find-symbols first makes a precompiled-regexp object. This operation allocates, therefore if you need to repeatedly call regexp-find-symbols with the same pattern, it is better to call precompile-regexp once and pass its result, a precompiled-regexp, as pattern.

case-sensitive controls whether a string pattern is precompiled as a case sensitive or case insensitive search. A non-nil value means a case sensitive search. The value nil (the default) means a case insensitive search. case-sensitive is ignored if pattern is not a string.

packages specifies in which packages to search. The default value of packages is :all, meaning search in all packages.

test, if supplied, must be a function of one argument, which returns t if the argument should be returned, and nil otherwise. The function test is applied to each symbol that matches pattern, and if it returns nil the symbol is not included in the returned value symbols. If test is nil all matches are returned. The default value of test is nil.

external-only, if true, specifies that only external symbols should be checked, which makes the search much faster. The default value of external-only is nil.

The regular expression syntax used by regexp-find-symbols is similar to that used by Emacs, as described in 28.7 Regular expression syntax.

Examples

To find all exported symbols that start with DEF:

(lw:regexp-find-symbols "^def" :external-only t)

To find all symbols that contain lower case "slider":

(regexp-find-symbols "slider" :case-sensitive t)

See also

apropos
find-regexp-in-string