Common Lisp Tips

:start and :end with parse-integer

parse-integer takes :start and :end arguments, so you don’t have to extract integer subsequences from strings to pass them to parse-integer. For example, to parse date strings that look like “2011-10-01” into year, month, and date integers, you can do this:

(defun parse-date (string)
  "Parse a date string in the form YYYY-MM-DD and return the
   year, month, and day as multiple values."
  (values (parse-integer string :start 0 :end 4)
          (parse-integer string :start 5 :end 7)
          (parse-integer string :start 8 :end 10)))