I was looking at tabular data on a wiki page:
|[[...]] | 1 | 6563| 3796| |[[...]] | — | |[[...]] | 1/3 | 2315| 1259| |[[...]] | — | |[[...]] | 1/3 | 159| 607| |[[...]] | — | |[[...]] | 1/3 | 159| 597| |[[...]] | — |
I wanted to add 56 to some of the values in the third column.
Emacs to the rescue: M-C-% to run query-replace-regexp and search for ^\(|[^|]*|[^|]*|[^|0-9]*\)\([0-9]+\) and replace it with \1\,(+ (string-to-number \2) 56)) – I was surprised at how easy it was once I had remembered to use \, in the replacement pattern.
Update: EmacsWiki:PierreGaston tells me that I could have used \#2 instead of (string-to-number \2). I guess I should have finished reading that paragraph on the Info page. 
Tags: Emacs 