I want to change in vim the following text:
test aatest
aaaa test a2test
xxxxx test 4 xctesc
to
test a5test
aaaa test a5test
xxxxx test 4 x5tesc
I want to change the 5th to last character of each line into 5
Is there a command that can change the nth column relative to the last column on multiple lines?
Solution A
Already mentioned in the comments: For each line, go to the end, move 4 left, replace.
:%normal! $4hr5
Solution B
With :substitute: match the 5 last characters, capturing the first and last four separately, then modify in the replacement.
:%substitute/\(.\)\(....\)$/5\2/
Related
Data format:
ab b c
ab b
abc d e
abcd e
Each row could be 2 or 3 columns, delimited by a white space. I want to match any row in which the first column length is 4. How do I do this?
I've tried to do the following:
/.... \{_}
But VIM reports a syntax error. Why is that?
Moving my comment into an answer. I suggest using /^[^ ]\{4} .*$
The first ^ matches the start of a line (so we know we're looking at the first column), the [^ ]\{4} matches 4 characters that aren't spaces (so we don't match if it's fewer than 4 characters), the space after that matches a space (so we don't match a column with more than 4 characters), and the .*$ makes sure we match all the way to the end of the line (not sure if you actually care about that... if you're just seeking within the file it won't matter, but if you're replacing or something you might want it).
I came upon an example of sed simulating cat -s, which will replace two or more empty lines by one empty line.
The command is below
echo -e "\n-------------\nline1\n\nline2\nline3\n\n\nline4\n\n\n\nlast line\n-------------" | sed '1s/^$//p;/./,/^$/!d'
I understand the sed part has two parts. The first one, '1s/^$//p' will take place on first line and will just print nothing to the first line of it's empty. Ok, that part I get it.
Now, for the second part, '/./,/^$/!d', it will delete the line if it does not match /./, any single character or /^$/ empty line. That covers pretty much anything, no? How come an empty line after another empty line is matched by that?
The sed manual says this:
Appending the '!' character to the end of an address specification
(before the command letter) negates the sense of the match.
The sed command /./,/^$/!d is therefore "delete rows that are not in a range defined by a line with any character until and including one blank line". So it will delete rows that are not in this kind of range.
1 -------------
2 line1
3
4 line2
5 line3
6
7
8 line4
9
10
11
12 last line
13 -------------
14
The first range is lines 1-3.
The second range is lines 4-6.
The next range is lines 8-9.
The last range is lines 12-14.
Lines 7 and 10-11 do not fall into any of the matched ranges, so they are affected by the ! modifier, and they get deleted.
I can think of ways to do this in other programming languages that would be more clear, but if all you've got is sed then this is an effective way to reduce redundant blank lines.
I’d like to merge two blocks of lines in Vim, i.e., take lines k through l and append them to lines m through n. If you prefer a pseudocode explanation: [line[k+i] + line[m+i] for i in range(min(l-k, n-m)+1)].
For example,
abc
def
...
123
45
...
should become
abc123
def45
Is there a nice way to do this without copying and pasting manually line by line?
You can certainly do all this with a single copy/paste (using block-mode selection), but I'm guessing that's not what you want.
If you want to do this with just Ex commands
:5,8del | let l=split(#") | 1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
will transform
work it
make it
do it
makes us
harder
better
faster
stronger
~
into
work it harder
make it better
do it faster
makes us stronger
~
UPDATE: An answer with this many upvotes deserves a more thorough explanation.
In Vim, you can use the pipe character (|) to chain multiple Ex commands, so the above is equivalent to
:5,8del
:let l=split(#")
:1,4s/$/\=remove(l,0)/
Many Ex commands accept a range of lines as a prefix argument - in the above case the 5,8 before the del and the 1,4 before the s/// specify which lines the commands operate on.
del deletes the given lines. It can take a register argument, but when one is not given, it dumps the lines to the unnamed register, #", just like deleting in normal mode does. let l=split(#") then splits the deleted lines into a list, using the default delimiter: whitespace. To work properly on input that had whitespace in the deleted lines, like:
more than
hour
our
never
ever
after
work is
over
~
we'd need to specify a different delimiter, to prevent "work is" from being split into two list elements: let l=split(#","\n").
Finally, in the substitution s/$/\=remove(l,0)/, we replace the end of each line ($) with the value of the expression remove(l,0). remove(l,0) alters the list l, deleting and returning its first element. This lets us replace the deleted lines in the order in which we read them. We could instead replace the deleted lines in reverse order by using remove(l,-1).
An elegant and concise Ex command solving the issue can be obtained by
combining the :global, :move, and :join commands. Assuming that
the first block of lines starts on the first line of the buffer, and
that the cursor is located on the line immediately preceding the first
line of the second block, the command is as follows.
:1,g/^/''+m.|-j!
For detailed explanation of this technique, see my answer to
an essentially the same question “How to achieve the “paste -d '␣'”
behavior out of the box in Vim?”.
To join blocks of line, you have to do the following steps:
Go to the third line: jj
Enter visual block mode: CTRL-v
Anchor the cursor to the end of the line (important for lines of differing length): $
Go to the end: CTRL-END
Cut the block: x
Go to the end of the first line: kk$
Paste the block here: p
The movement is not the best one (I'm not an expert), but it works like you wanted. Hope there will be a shorter version of it.
Here are the prerequisits so this technique works well:
All lines of the starting block (in the example in the question abc and def) have the same length XOR
the first line of the starting block is the longest, and you don't care about the additional spaces in between) XOR
The first line of the starting block is not the longest, and you additional spaces to the end.
Here's how I'd do it (with the cursor on the first line):
qama:5<CR>y$'a$p:5<CR>dd'ajq3#a
You need to know two things:
The line number on which the first line of the second group starts (5 in my case), and
the number of lines in each group (3 in my example).
Here's what's going on:
qa records everything up to the next q into a "buffer" in a.
ma creates a mark on the current line.
:5<CR> goes to the next group.
y$ yanks the rest of the line.
'a returns to the mark, set earlier.
$p pastes at the end of the line.
:5<CR> returns to the second group's first line.
dd deletes it.
'a returns to the mark.
jq goes down one line, and stops recording.
3#a repeats the action for each line (3 in my case)
As mentioned elsewhere, block selection is the way to go. But you can also use any variant of:
:!tail -n -6 % | paste -d '\0' % - | head -n 5
This method relies on the UNIX command line. The paste utility was created to handle this sort of line merging.
PASTE(1) BSD General Commands Manual PASTE(1)
NAME
paste -- merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSIS
paste [-s] [-d list] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a single tab character,
and writes the resulting lines to standard output. If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files still contain data, the file is treated as if
it were an endless source of empty lines.
Sample data is the same as rampion's.
:1,4s/$/\=getline(line('.')+4)/ | 5,8d
I wouldn't think make it too complicated.
I would just set virtualedit on
(:set virtualedit=all)
Select block 123 and all below.
Put it after the first column:
abc 123
def 45
... ...
and remove the multiple space between to 1 space:
:%s/\s\{2,}/ /g
I would use complex repeats :)
Given this:
aaa
bbb
ccc
AAA
BBB
CCC
With the cursor on the first line, press the following:
qa}jdd''pkJxjq
and then press #a (and you may subsequently use ##) as many times as needed.
You should end up with:
aaaAAA
bbbBBB
cccCCC
(Plus a newline.)
Explaination:
qa starts recording a complex repeat in a
} jumps to the next empty line
jdd deletes the next line
'' goes back to the position before the last jump
p paste the deleted line under the current one
kJ append the current line to the end of the previous one
x delete the space that J adds between the combined lines; you can omit this if you want the space
j go to the next line
q end the complex repeat recording
After that you'd use #a to run the complex repeat stored in a, and then you can use ## to rerun the last ran complex repeat.
There can be many number of ways to accomplish this. I will merge two blocks of text using any of the following two methods.
suppose first block is at line 1 and 2nd block starts from line 10 with the cursor's initial position at line number 1.
(\n means pressing the enter key.)
1. abc
def
ghi
10. 123
456
789
with a macro using the commands: copy,paste and join.
qaqqa:+9y\npkJjq2#a10G3dd
with a macro using the commands move a line at nth line number and join.
qcqqc:10m .\nkJjq2#c
How I can move or shift the words in the entire file to the specified column?
For example like below:
Before :
123 ABC
112 XYZS
15925 asdf
1111 25asd
1 qwer
After :
123 ABC
112 XYZS
15925 asdf
1111 25asd
1 qwer
How it can be done using command mode?
Here the thing is we need to shift the 2nd word to the specified column
Here the specified column is 8
except for vim-plugins mentioned by others, if you were working on a linux box with column command available, you could just :
%!column -t
% could be vim ranges, e.g. visual selections etc..
Approach with built-in commands
First :substitute the whitespace with a Tab character, and then :retab to a tab stop to column 8, expanding to spaces (for your given example):
:.,.+4substitute/\s\+/\t/ | set tabstop=7 expandtab | '[,']retab
(I'm omitting the resetting of the modified options, should that matter to you.)
Approach with plugin
My AlignFromCursor plugin has commands that align text to the right of the cursor to a certain column. Combine that with a :global command that invokes this for all lines in the range, and a W motion to go to the second word in each, and you'll get:
.,.+4global/^/exe 'normal! W' | LeftAlignFromCursor 8
I use the Tabular plugin. After installing it, you run the following command:
:%Tab/\s
where \s means whitespace character
I have made two functions for this problem.
I have posted it here : https://github.com/imbichie/vim-vimrc-/blob/master/MCCB_MCCE.vim
We need to call this function in vim editor and give the Number of Occurrence of the Character or Space that you wants to move and the character inside the '' and the column number.
The number of occurrence can be from the starting of each line (MCCB function) or can be at the end of each line (MCCE function).
for the above example mentioned in the question we can use the MCCB function and the character we can use space, so the usage will be like this in the vim editor.
:1,5call MCCB(1,' ',8)
So this will move the first space (' ') to the 8th column from line number 1 to 5.
In Vim you can use Ctrl+v to select a vertical block of code. This is pretty cool, as this way you can insert a rectangular block of text anywhere in your text. A feature I haven't seen anywhere else yet.
But say I have a text like:
1 abcde
2 abcdefg
3 abcdefg
4 abc
I want to select this full block as vertical block. If I'm on the a of line 1, and start selection, then move down to line 4, I can only move the cursor to the last character c in that line. So the lines above are cut off, giving me this selection:
1 abc
2 abc
3 abc
4 abc
Is there a way to get the full text selected as vertical block?
if you want to select exact 4 lines (including the 1st line), you could:
Ctrl-V$3j
this selects all the texts, but they are not really in a "block", because the first line and the last line have different length.
If you do want have a "block" of text, (appending spaces on those "shorter" lines), you could:
set ve=all
Ctrl-V hhhhh... jjjjj...
by setting ve to all, your cursor could go anywhere. If you like after the selection/copying, you could set the ve back to its original value.
A minute after asking this question i found it out myself. The trick is to press $ on line 4 above. So the full series of keystrokes, if the cursor is on the a of line 1 is:
Ctrl+v3j$
a quick and dirty solution is to insert 4 spaces a the end of line 4.