From: Pascal Bourguignon
Subject: Re: Getting started in Lisp: simple tasks
Date: 
Message-ID: <87pt3mpcyu.fsf@thalassa.informatimago.com>
··········@righto.com (Ken Shirriff) writes:

> I read Paul Grahams's essays and have decided to try using Lisp.  I'd
> like to find out how to use Lisp for tasks I typically do in, say,
> Python.  Here are some examples:
> 
> a) Open all files with the suffix ".abc".  Look for all lines that
> contain a particular regular expression and print the matching parts.

http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/

DIRECTORY
MAKE-PATHNAME
DOLIST
WITH-OPEN-FILE
FORMAT

In clisp:
http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/
REGEXP:MATCH
REGEXP-MATCH-STRING
 

> b) Read an XML file and print out all the text entities.

About the same list as above.
I would fetch a library to read XML, or use Zebu to write a parser...
Search them on http://www.cliki.net/
 
> c) Fetch a given web page, extract the links, and pipe the results
> into an external command.

In clisp:
See the implementation notes about the SOCKET package and EXT:RUN-PROGRAM.


> I really don't know where to begin to solve these tasks using Lisp. 
> The Common Lisp Hyper Spec and the Lisp books I looked at discuss
> "pure" Lisp programming, rather than the kinds of problems I need to
> solve.  I think what I need is O'Reilly's "Lisp in a Nutshell" except
> they don't publish it.
> 
> So can someone point me at the documentation, book, or libraries I
> should be using?
> 
> (I'm running Lisp in a box on Windows XP, but could run a Linux
> version of Lisp instead.)
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Ken Shirriff

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

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