You might be able to do more precise surgery with org-element (justMatt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm revising my course syllabi for next Fall and therefore need to
> update all the timestamps. In this case, I need to add 361 days to
> every stamp. Is there a function somewhere that can read a timestamp,
> convert it to a numerical value, change the value, and then record the
> new value in the right format? It would make my life easier if I could
> at least define a macro to do this.
>
guessing here: I haven't done anything with org-element yet), but if you
can search for the timestamps simply, you might be able to get away with
just a keyboard macro, e.g. if all timestamps are of the form
<YYYY-MM-DD ...> and *nothing else* looks like that, then a keyboard
macro that does something like the following:
search for "<201"
advance a few chars to get to the DD part
ESC 361 S-<up>
might be all that you need. Then you repeat (once) with C-x e or (many
times) with C-u 1000 C-x e.
But it really depends on identifying a search string that will not lead
you astray. Also make sure you save a backup of your file before you
start - you may have to do this a couple of times before you get it
right.
Assuming that the simple search above is sufficient, doing
C-x ( C-s < 2 0 1 RET 6*C-f ESC 3 6 1 <S-up> C-x )
to define the macro should be enough. kmacro-edit-macro then shows me this:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;; Keyboard Macro Editor. Press C-c C-c to finish; press C-x k RET to cancel.
;; Original keys: C-s < 2 0 1 RET 6*C-f ESC 3 6 1 <S-up>
Command: last-kbd-macro
Key: none
Macro:
C-s ;; isearch-forward
< ;; self-insert-command
2 ;; self-insert-command
0 ;; self-insert-command
1 ;; self-insert-command
RET ;; org-return
6*C-f ;; forward-char
ESC
3 ;; self-insert-command
6 ;; self-insert-command
1 ;; self-insert-command
<S-up> ;; org-shiftup
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
HTH,
Nick