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I'm relatively new to Elisp and I'm trying to figure out a bug in my code, but I have no idea what to search or read in order to get an idea about it.

The bug is in this code:

(defvar some-variable "some-value")
(setq some-plist
      '(:name "name" :query some-variable :key 97))

(stringp (plist-get some-plist :query))  ;; nil (HERE)
(stringp some-variable) ;; t

Even though (plist-get some-plist :query) returns some-variable, why does stringp on it returns nil?

Drew
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user5954246
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1 Answers1

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You need to "unquote" some-variable when building the plist. So the code should look like this:

(defvar some-variable "some-value")
(setq some-plist
      `(:name "name" :query ,some-variable :key 97))

(stringp (plist-get some-plist :query))  ;; t (HERE)
(stringp some-variable) ;; t

When you build a list using a quote ', everything is added to the list verbatim. So, going back to the snippet you posted, even though some-variable evaluates to a string, '(some-variable) is equivalent to (list 'some-variable) (a list with a quoted symbol).

To get what you are asking for, you can either use a backtick-quoted list and unquote some-variable

`(,some-variable)

or just use the list form

(list some-variable)
David Leal
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    Generally speaking, it is convenient to construct a property list using list instead of backquoting, since keyword symbols are self-evaluating, so you don't need to quote them, and it is fairly common to want to evaluate the values in a plist anyway. – Philip K. Dec 27 '22 at 17:44
  • That certainly makes sense. Thanks for the tip. – David Leal Dec 28 '22 at 21:50