Next: Writing to Files, Previous: Saving Buffers, Up: Files [Contents][Index]
You can copy a file from the disk and insert it into a buffer
using the insert-file-contents
function. Don’t use the user-level
command insert-file
in a Lisp program, as that sets the mark.
This function inserts the contents of file filename into the current buffer after point. It returns a list of the absolute file name and the length of the data inserted. An error is signaled if filename is not the name of a file that can be read.
The function insert-file-contents
checks the file contents
against the defined file formats, and converts the file contents if
appropriate. See Format Conversion. It also calls the functions in
the list after-insert-file-functions
; see Saving Properties.
If visit is non-nil
, this function additionally marks the
buffer as unmodified and sets up various fields in the buffer so that it
is visiting the file filename: these include the buffer’s visited
file name and its last save file modtime. This feature is used by
find-file-noselect
and you probably should not use it yourself.
If start and end are non-nil
, they should be integers
specifying the portion of the file to insert. In this case, visit
must be nil
. For example,
(insert-file-contents filename nil 0 500)
inserts the first 500 characters of a file.
If the argument replace is non-nil
, it means to replace the
contents of the buffer (actually, just the accessible portion) with the
contents of the file. This is better than simply deleting the buffer
contents and inserting the whole file, because (1) it preserves some
marker positions and (2) it puts less data in the undo list.
If you want to pass a file name to another process so that another
program can read the file, use the function file-local-copy
; see
Magic File Names.
Next: Writing to Files, Previous: Saving Buffers, Up: Files [Contents][Index]