GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
24.4 Describing Characters for Help Messages
These functions convert events, key sequences, or characters to
textual descriptions. These descriptions are useful for including
arbitrary text characters or key sequences in messages, because they
convert non-printing and whitespace characters to sequences of printing
characters. The description of a non-whitespace printing character is
the character itself.
- Function: key-description sequence
-
This function returns a string containing the Emacs standard notation
for the input events in sequence. The argument sequence may
be a string, vector or list. See section 21.6 Input Events, for more information
about valid events. See also the examples for
single-key-description, below.
- Function: single-key-description event &optional no-angles
-
This function returns a string describing event in the standard
Emacs notation for keyboard input. A normal printing character
appears as itself, but a control character turns into a string
starting with `C-', a meta character turns into a string starting
with `M-', and space, tab, etc. appear as `SPC',
`TAB', etc. A function key symbol appears inside angle brackets
`<...>'. An event that is a list appears as the name of the
symbol in the CAR of the list, inside angle brackets.
If the optional argument no-angles is non-nil, the angle
brackets around function keys and event symbols are omitted; this is
for compatibility with old versions of Emacs which didn't use the
brackets.
| | (single-key-description ?\C-x)
=> "C-x"
(key-description "\C-x \M-y \n \t \r \f123")
=> "C-x SPC M-y SPC C-j SPC TAB SPC RET SPC C-l 1 2 3"
(single-key-description 'delete)
=> "<delete>"
(single-key-description 'C-mouse-1)
=> "<C-mouse-1>"
(single-key-description 'C-mouse-1 t)
=> "C-mouse-1"
|
- Function: text-char-description character
- This function returns a string describing character in the
standard Emacs notation for characters that appear in text--like
single-key-description, except that control characters are
represented with a leading caret (which is how control characters in
Emacs buffers are usually displayed).
| | (text-char-description ?\C-c)
=> "^C"
(text-char-description ?\M-m)
=> "M-m"
(text-char-description ?\C-\M-m)
=> "M-^M"
|
- Function: read-kbd-macro string
- This function is used mainly for operating on keyboard macros, but it
can also be used as a rough inverse for
key-description. You
call it with a string containing key descriptions, separated by spaces;
it returns a string or vector containing the corresponding events.
(This may or may not be a single valid key sequence, depending on what
events you use; see section 22.1 Keymap Terminology.)
