Emacs add quotes around every word

Question

I have a file and i want to add quotes around every word for example hello becomes "hello" So far i have tried this in emacs:

M-x query-replace-regexp [a-z]+ RET "\1" y

But it just deletes the word and leaves quotes.

Answer 1

This is what you want:

M-x query-replace-regexp \(\<\w+\>\) RET "\1" y