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
> @johnkitchin
> http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu
>
>