## Use of the Macro

Our new example adds prefix and suffix text to a series of selected lines. This macro can be used to reduce typing for a series of text items that must be preceded and following by identical text. In Java, for example, if we are interested in making a series of calls to `StringBuffer.append()` to construct a lengthy, formatted string, we could type the parameter for each call on successive lines as follows:

    profileString_1
    secretThing.toString()
    name
    address
    addressSupp
    city
    “state/province”
    country

Our macro would ask for input for the common “prefix” and “suffix” to be applied to each line; in this case, the prefix is `ourStringBuffer.append(` and the suffix is `);`. After selecting these lines and running the macro, the resulting text would look like this:

    ourStringBuffer.append(profileString_1);
    ourStringBuffer.append(secretThing.toString());
    ourStringBuffer.append(name);
    ourStringBuffer.append(address);
    ourStringBuffer.append(addressSupp);
    ourStringBuffer.append(city);
    ourStringBuffer.append(“state/province”);
    ourStringBuffer.append(country);