Emacs was created to do such things--in fact the name E-macs is a terse form of Editor-Macros {originally a derivative of TECO}

{There is a huge list of what Emacs should stand for--my fave is: Emacs Makes All Computing Simple}

Now, what I'm suggesting is you make a macro, and store and reuse it--to get you started, I suggest something like this

Cs*
Cn
C@
Cs**
Cx (
replace-string
Cqj
Return
\n
Return
Cx )
name-last-macro
Give it a name & save it & re-use it and/or EXTEND it later

On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 7:05 PM John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
Hi everyone,

I am trying to get the body of a heading up to the next subheading. For example with this org file,

* quiz one

This is the description. 
Use emacs for this.

** question 1
what is 40 + 2

If the point is in the first heading, I want to run a function that would return the string "This is the description.\nUse emacs for this."

I thought there was a simple way to do that, but so far it has eluded my google fu. Any hints?

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin 
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803