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I want to create an Emacs lisp function which

  1. composes a path of a diary file which has the format <some directory>/t<timestamp>.org and
  2. determines whether or not such file exists.

I wrote this:

(defun open-diary () (interactive) ;; TODO: Find out whether or not file-name exists (let ((file-name (format-time-string "/some-dir/diary-files/t%Y%m%d.org")) (diary-file-exists (file-exists-p file-name))) (message diary-file-exists)))

When I run M-x open-diary I get the error Symbol's value as variable is void: file-name.

How can I fix it, i. e. make sure that (file-exists-p file-name) sees the file-name variable defined above?

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    let bindings occur in parallel. You want let* instead (or even when-let, but lets get this working first :-) Commented May 16, 2023 at 8:07
  • You should make that into a proper answer so that it can be accepted. Commented May 16, 2023 at 9:22
  • emacs.stackexchange.com/tags/elisp/info Commented May 16, 2023 at 13:22

1 Answer 1

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First, lispers read code by indentation, not by counting parens, so your code was hard to read (I fixed that).

Second, let binds variables in parallel, while let* does it sequentially (see Local Variables).

Thus you need to use the latter:

(defun open-diary () (interactive) ;; TODO: Find out whether or not file-name exists (let* ((file-name (format-time-string "/some-dir/diary-files/t%Y%m%d.org")) (diary-file-exists (file-exists-p file-name))) (message "%s exists? %s" file-name diary-file-exists)))
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