Getting list of results from etags.el

Question

I'm generating a tags file (in emacs format) using exuberant ctags, I pass this additional flag:

--regex-PHP=/do\_action\(\ '([a-zA-Z0-9\_]+)'/\1/a,actions/

Which successfully captures what I want, the issue is I want to use emacs lisp to return all tags marked as "a" in the form of a list - or I'll even settle for just matching a regular expression of do_action.

Unfortunately, it seems everything in etags.el is geared towards interactive usage, find-tag-in-order was the only non-interactive way I could think to do it, but my code returns an error message regardless of whether or not anything is matching:

(find-tag-in-order
 "test_string"
 find-tag-regexp-search-function
 find-tag-regexp-tag-order
 find-tag-regexp-next-line-after-failure-p
 "matching"
 t)

While doing an interactive M-x find-tag test_string will bring me to the file and point in which it's defined.

The ideal usage would be something like: (tags-of-type "a") or (tags-matching "do_action"). Though I understand the name of the tag is what's matched in the parenthesized group of my regular expression.

Any ideas?

Update: Though this does not solve the issue of getting tags in the form of an emacs lisp list, I realize that with the --PHP-kinds parameter it will be possible to maintain multiple tags files for each type.

In this method, the approach (while not working) would be something like this:

(let ((tags-table-list '("tag-file-1")))
  (tags-search "specific-to-tag-file-1"))

Answer 1

What you want, I think, is (tags-completion-table). It returns an obarray of symbols that are entries in the current TAGS tables.

In any case, depending on just what it is that you are after, I think function tags-completion-table and its cache variable of the same name are the place to start. Both are defined in library etags.el.

(If you need a list of strings instead of an obarray of symbols, just use mapatoms and symbol-name.)