Replace a string using vim - vim

I want to replace the 50th occurrence of Alex with Alex(the father) using vim.
The problem is this: after I execute the replace command, I want to search again for the word Alex and I do not want the replaced one to be displayed anymore.
So when I do gg49/Alex and press 'n' I want vim to skip Alex(the father) and jump to the 51st occurance of Alex (51st in the original document).
So what I want is that vim does not show me the sub-string Alex, only the exact match. Is there any way to do this?

You can do this search with a negative lookahead against a left parenthesis to avoid matching Alex when it is followed by anything that starts with (.
/\<Alex\>\((\)\#!

Related

How to search with a criteria in sublime?

in sublime if you want to search for a string "apple" but not "apple."
How do you do that?
Thank you all.
I heard somewhere you can add a - to substract unwanted hit but don't know where to put it.
With regular expression, you can use:
\bapple(?!\.)
Where (?!\.) is a negative lookahead that make sure we haven't a dot after apple and \b is a word boundary to be sure to not match pinapple

Vim search and replace to amend a string with common structure but varying words

I'm fairly new to Vim and I haven't been able to find on this site how to search and replace with a varying part of a string. I need to apply a global edit to all times "SetTag("...")" appears with ... being any word. My edit is to add one more word after the second quotation mark. example: SetTag("err" + __LINE__ with the bolded part being what I need to add. Can anyone let me know how this is possible with a vim search command? Thanks!
nb: I assume "word" is any sequence of characters other than a doublequote character. Modify as needed.
:%s/SetTag("\([^"]*\)")/SetTag("\1" + __LINE__)/
the escaped parentheses grab the sub-match; the \1 in the replacement string is replaced by that sub-match.

How to complete the whole list with Vim?

I have a list of products to place on a rails seed and I would like to instead of put brackets one by one on the list with a command place the brackets on the whole list?
for example:
1. Dakine
2. Dale of Norway
3. Dan Post
1. ["Dakine"],
2. ["Dale of Norway"],
3. ["Dan Post"],
I searched on the help but did not find any about. Thanks.
You can record a macro in Vim and repeat that.
If you are on number 1, you can do following:
qqf a["Esc$a"],Esc0jq
Explanation:
qq: Start recording macro in register q
f: Go to first space character
a: : Insert after (the space character from above)
\[": Insert those characters
Esc: Back to normal mode
$: Go to end of line
a: Insert after (end of line)
"],: Insert the characters
Esc: Back to normal mode
0: Jump to start of line
j: Go down one line
If you have 100 such lines, you can do 100#q to achieve your result.
With vim substitute command:
:%s/.*/["&"]/
If you don't want to operate on all lines, then select the ones you want to transform or note the related line numbers, and then type :s/..... without the %. You'll see actually :'<,'>s this range represent the visually selected lines, and vim adds it automatically in visual mode.
On Atom you can enable the find to use Regex in the search(there is a button next to the search field)
Then you can search for something like (^.*$) to get every line separated by groups and in the Replace field you use ["$1"],. The $1 represents the value matched by the Regex.
Then just do a Replace All and remove the last comma in your list if needed.

Vim - Insert something between every letter

In vim I have a line of text like this:
abcdef
Now I want to add an underscore or something else between every letter, so this would be the result:
a_b_c_d_e_f
The only way I know of doing this wold be to record a macro like this:
qqa_<esc>lq4#q
Is there a better, easier way to do this?
:%s/\(\p\)\p\#=/\1_/g
The : starts a command.
The % searches the whole document.
The \(\p\) will match and capture a printable symbol. You could replace \p with \w if you only wanted to match characters, for example.
The \p\#= does a lookahead check to make sure that the matched (first) \p is followed by another \p. This second one, i.e., \p\#= does not form part of the match. This is important.
In the replacement part, \1 fills in the matched (first) \p value, and the _ is a literal.
The last flag, g is the standard do them all flag.
If you want to add _ only between letters you can do it like this:
:%s/\a\zs\ze\a/_/g
Replace \a with some other pattern if you want more than ASCII letters.
To understand how this is supposed to work: :help \a, :help \zs, :help \ze.
Here's a quick and a little more interactive way of doing this, all in normal mode.
With the cursor at the beginning of the line, press:
i_<Esc>x to insert and delete the separator character. (We do this for the side effect.)
gp to put the separator back.
., hold it down until the job is done.
Unfortunately we can't use a count with . here, because it would just paste the separator 'count' times on the spot.
Use positive lookahead and substitute:
:%s/\(.\(.\)\#=\)/\1_/g
This will match any character followed by any character except line break.
:%s/../&:/g
This will add ":" after every two characters, for the whole line.
The first two periods signify the number of characters to be skipped.
The "&" (from what I gathered) is interpreted by vim to identify what character is going to be added.
Simply indicate that character right after "&"
"/g" makes the change globally.
I haven't figured out how to exclude the end of the line though, with the result being that the characters inserted get tagged onto the end...so that something like:
"c400ad4db63b"
Becomes "c4:00:ad:4d:b6:3b:"

how to do conditional replacing using vim

I want to replace word with WORD, but only on the lines which start with -. Anybody knows how to do it?
:%g/^-/s/word/WORD/g
it's just a normal search and replace, but using g// to filter the lines you want to run it on.

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