Align text after n-th column in vim removing unnecessary blanks - vim

Question

In vim, in a Windows machine (with no access to "unix"-like commands such command column) I want to reformat this code to make it more readable:
COLUMN KEY_ID FORMAT 9999999999
COLUMN VALUE_1 FORMAT 99
COLUMN VALUE_2 FORMAT 99
COLUMN VALUE_3 FORMAT 999
COLUMN VALUE_4 FORMAT 999
And I want to have this using as less commands as possible:
COLUMN KEY_ID FORMAT 9999999999
COLUMN VALUE_1 FORMAT 99
COLUMN VALUE_2 FORMAT 99
COLUMN VALUE_3 FORMAT 999
COLUMN VALUE_4 FORMAT 999
Note this is just an excerpt, as there many more lines in which I must do the same.

Answer 1

You could use the following command:
:%s/\w\zs\s*\zeFORMAT/^I
The pattern will match the whitespaces between FORMAT and the end of the previous word and replace it by a tab:
\w Any 'word' character
\zs Start the matching
\s* Any number of whitespace
\ze End the matching
FORMAT The actual word format
\zs and \ze allow to apply the substitution only on the whitespaces see: :h /\zs and :h /\ze
Note that ^I should be inserted with ctrl+vtab
The tabular plugin recommended by #SatoKatsura would be a good way to do it too.
You can also generalize that. Let's say you have the following file:
COLUMN KEY_ID FORMAT 9999999999
COLUMN VALUE_1 FOO 99
COLUMN VALUE_2 BAR 99
You could use this command:
:%s/^\(\w*\s\)\{1}\w*\zs\s*\ze/
Were the pattern can be detailed like that:
^ Match the beginning of the line
\(\w*\s\)\{1} One occurrence of the pattern \w*\s i.e. one column
\w* Another column
\zs\s*\ze The whitespaces after the previous column
You could change the value of \{1} to apply the command on the next columns.
EDIT to answer #aturegano comment, here is a way to align the column to another one:
%s/^\(\w*\s\)\{1}\w*\zs\s*\ze/\=repeat(' ', 30-matchstrpos(getline('.'), submatch(0))[1])
The idea is still to match the whitespaces which must be aligned, on the second part of the substitution command we use a sub-replace-expression (See :h sub-replace-expression).
This allows us to use a command from the substitution part, which can be explained like this:
\= Interpret the next characters as a command
repeat(' ', XX) Replace the match with XX whitespaces
XX is decomposed like this:
30- 30 less the next expression
matchstrpos()[1] Returns the columns where the second argument appears in the first one
getline('.') The current line (i.e. the one containing the match
submatch(0) The matched string
[1] Necessary since matchstrpos() returns a list:
[matchedString, StartPosition, EndPosition]
and we are looking for the second value.
You then simply have to replace 30 by the column where you want to move your next column.
See :h matchstrpos(), :h getline() and :h submatch()

Answer 2

For alignment, there are three well-known plugins:
the venerable Align - Help folks to align text, eqns, declarations, tables, etc
the modern tabular
the contender vim-easy-align

Answer 3

Posting an answer as requested:
:g/^COLUMN / s/.*/\=call('printf', ['%s %-30s %s %s'] + split(submatch(0)))/
Explanation:
g/^COLUMN / - apply the following command to lines matching /^COLUMN / (cf. :h :global)
\= - replace with the result of evaluating an expression, rather than with a fixed string (cf. :h s/\=)
submatch(0) - the line being matched
split(...) - split line into words
printf(...) - format the line
call(...) - we'd like to have printf('%s %-30s %s %s', list), but printf() doesn't take "real" lists as arguments, so we have to unfold the list with a call(...) (cf. :h call()).

Answer 4

Yet another solution:
:%s/ \{2,}/ /g
This solution is not perfect because the result will have an extra single space on the first line. To fix this problem:
:%s/\%>15c \{2,}/ /g
Explanation of pattern:
%>15c\s\{2,}
%>15c Matches only after column 15
\s\{2,} Matches two or more white spaces