How do you use (list-at-point) in elisp?

Question

I sometimes use (number-at-point), (string-at-point), (sexp-at-point) and I had a need for:

(list-at-point)

I want to be able to grab some text like:

a b c d

and use list-at-point to grab it as an elisp list, and then do some processing on it.

But I can't seem to get list-at-point to return anything but nil.

I'm using Emacs on windows, v22.3.1

Answer 1

It appears you've found a bug, None of the functions that depend on form-at-point seem to work for me, which the ones that depend on thing-at-point do. Have a look at the file thngatpt.el in the elisp sources.

The function has sufficient hair that I can't debug it at this hour, but it's clearly not doing what it advertises. Googling reveals other complaints.

You might see if replacing it with thingatpt+.el is better.