indent-region-as

Posted by David N. Welton Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:35:00 GMT

At times, when I'm working with an HTML file - an article about programming, for instance - I need to include a snippet of code inside a <pre> tag or a <code> tag. It's very annoying to have to indent that code by hand, and since the language may be anything from Hecl, to Erlang, to Java to C, I don't want to use something like two-mode-mode for Emacs, so I threw the following elisp together:

(defun indent-region-as (other-mode)
  "Indent selected region as some other mode.  Used in order to indent source code contained within HTML."
  (interactive "aMode to use: ")

  (save-excursion
(let ((old-mode major-mode))
  (narrow-to-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
  (funcall other-mode)
  (indent-region (region-beginning) (region-end) nil)
  (funcall old-mode)))
  (widen))

To use it:

  1. Put it in your .emacs file.
  2. Select the region to indent according to the other mode.
  3. M-x indent-region-as - which will prompt you for the other mode to use. You need to give the function for that mode, such as tcl-mode, java-mode, ruby-mode or whatever.

My elisp is a bit rusty, so I'm sure it's possible to improve the code above, but it does the job for me.

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Comments

  1. Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò said about 18 hours later:

    Hey thanks a lot for this! :)

    I happened to do something like that (well, the article was in docbook, but it's the same problem) and wondered why there wasn't an easy way... well now there is, thanks :)

  2. Harald Meland said 2 days later:
    I'd use ``make-indirect-buffer'' for this; that way, you can have all the bells and whistles of the programming language in question (syntax highlighting, etc) while the text ends up in the HTML buffer.

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