Let's say I have the following line of code:
something:somethingElse:anotherThing:woahYetAnotherThing
And I want to replace each : with a ; except the first one, such that the line looks like this:
something:somethingElse;anotherThing;woahYetAnotherThing
Is there a way to do this with the :[range]s/[search]/[replace]/[options] command without using the c option to confirm each replace operation?
As far as I can tell, the smallest range that s acts on is a single line. If this is true, then what is the fastest way to do the above task?
I'm fairly new to vim myself; I think you're right about range being lines-only (not 100% certain), but for this specific example you might try replacing all of the instances with a global flag, and then putting back the first one by omitting the global -- something like :s/:/;/g|s/;/:/.
Note: if the line contains a ; before the first : then this will not work.
Here you go...
:%s/\(:.*\):/\1;/|&|&|&|&
This is a simple regex substitute that takes care of one single not-the-first :.
The & command repeats the last substitute.
The | syntax separates multiple commands on one line. So, each substitute is repeated as many times as there are |& things.
Here is how you could use a single keystroke to do what you want (by mapping capital Q):
map Q :s/:/;/g\|:s/;/:<Enter>j
Every time you press Q the current line will be modified and the cursor will move to the next line.
In other words, you could just keep hitting Q multiple times to edit each successive line.
Explanation:
This will operate globally on the current line:
:s/:/;/g
This will switch the first semi-colon back to a colon:
:s/;/:
The answer by #AlliedEnvy combines these into one statement.
My map command assigns #AlliedEnvy's answer to the capital Q character.
Another approach (what I would probably do if I only had to do this once):
f:;r;;.
Then you can repeatedly press ;. until you reach the end of the line.
(Your choice to replace a semi-colon makes this somewhat comfusing)
Explanation:
f: - go to the first colon
; - go to the next colon (repeat in-line search)
r; - replace the current character with a semi-colon
; - repeat the last in-line search (again)
. - repeat the last command (replace current character with a semi-colon)
Long story short:
fx - moves to the next occurrence of x on the current line
; repeats the last inline search
While the other answers work well for this particular case, here's a more general solution:
Create a visual selection starting from the second element to the end of the line. Then, limit the substitution to the visual area by including \%V:
:'<,'>s/\%V:/;/g
Alternatively, you can use the vis.vim plugin
:'<,'>B s/:/;/g
Related
I am trying to clean up some code and I am trying to find a good way of achieving the following:
I am a #decent
guy
and I want:
I am a guy
I tried using
:g/#/d
but the whole line gets deleted and I only want to delete until the end of line. What is the best way to achieve this in vim?
Thank you.
That won't because the usage of that command:
:[range]g/pattern/cmd
defaults to range being the whole line, and you are not doing any substitution anyway.
Use:
:%s/#.\+\n//g
instead.
# Matches a literal #.
.\+\n Matches everything until the end of line, and a new line.
// Replaces the entire match with nothing.
With :global you would want something like
:global/#/normal! f#D | join
or
:global/#/substitute/#.*// | join
Try this instead:
:s/ # .*\n/ /
Explanation:
You were using the wrong command, as they may look similar to new users.
:[range]g/VRE/act Globally apply the "act"ion (one letter command) to all lines (in range, default all file) matching the VRE (pattern)
:[range]s/VRE/repl/f Substitute within lines (in range, default current line) the matching VRE (pattern) with the "repl"acement using optional "f"lags
Now about the pattern, I think this candidate cover most cases (all but comments at the beginning of a line and comments without space after pound sign)
# litteral space, then hash tag, then space again
.* dot for any character, star to mean the previous may occur many times or even be absent
$ dollar at end to stay at "end of line", but \n to catch en EOL here
press d + shift 4 or d + $, which means delete to end of the line
d means delete
shift 4 or $ means cursor to end of the line
The global option in my substitute doesn't seem to work. Even when I do substitute with g set it substitutes the text only in the current line. If I run it again while staying on the current line which doesn't have any more matches it gives me
E486: Pattern not found: {patt}
If I go to the next match and run it again it works fine for that line. But there is literally no difference in using g and not using it.
Any ideas on what's wrong?
printf("abc");
printf("def");
Doing :s/printf/print/g highlights both the printf's but only the replaces the first one. I need to do n to go the next match and rerun substitute.
The g flag is to substitute the pattern multiple times per line.
What you're looking for is running the s/// command for the entire buffer:
:%s/pattern/replacement/g
Notice the % in front of s///, to select the entire buffer. It could also be a range of lines like this:
:10,21s/pattern/replacement/g
to perform the replacement between lines 10 and 21.
Without the g flag there, only the first occurrence of pattern will be replaced per line.
Say I have a line that looks like this:
(Type)obj.method());
Is there a motion that will go to the last of a specific character on a line? I'd like to do
^c (motion to ')' character) (insert text) <Esc>
and transform that line to
obj.otherMethod());
I know I can use #f or #t, but I'd rather not count the parens.
As I understand your question, you don't just want to go to the last instance of a character, which you could achieve by going to the end of the line and searching backward. You want to clear text from your current caret position to the last instance of a character, right?
I'd typically use a pattern search to complete a motion to a desired character when there may be n of the same character in between. In your example, you can clear from the current caret position to the last ) by using c/);Enter, since only the last instance of o is followed by ;. You could precede this with a v instead of c, for example, if you wanted to select everything in between.
Using the same example, you could move to the 3rd o with /odEnter.
It may seem tedious at first, but in practice you are probably looking directly at the spot where you want be, so you can already see the additional characters you need and you only need to increase you specificity until you get the match, and you'll have immediate visual feedback as long as you have set incsearch.
Note: If your line did not have a semicolon at the end, you could move to the last paren by using )\n to search for the next ) followed by a line break.
You could use visual mode:
v$F)c
But in this case you're really just inserting some new text and changing the case:
f.aotherEscl~
I'm learning the power of g and want to delete all lines containing an expression, to the end of the sentence (marked by a period). Like so:
There was a little sheep. The sheep was black. There was another sheep.
(Run command to find all sentences like There was and delete to the next period).
The sheep was black.
I've tried:
:g/There was/d\/\. in an attempt to "delete forward until the next period" but I get a trailing characters error.
:g/There was/df. but get a df. is not an editor command error.
Any thoughts?
The action associated with g must be able to act on the line without needing position information from the pattern match that g implies. In the command you are using, the delete forward command needs a starting position that is not being provided.
The problem is that g only indicates a line match, not a specific character position for it's pattern match. I did the following and it did what I think you want:
:g/There was/s/There was[^.]*[.]//
This found lines that matched the pattern There was, and performed a substitution of the regular expression There was[^.]*[.] with the empty string.
This is equivalent to:
:1,$s/There was[^.]*[.]//g
I'm not sure what the g is getting you in your use case, except the automatic application to the entire file line range (same as 1,$ or %). The g in this latter example has to do with applying the substitution to all patterns on the same line, not with the range of lines affected by the substitution command.
I'd just use a regex:
%s/There was\_.\{-}\.\s\?//ge
Note how \_. allows for cross-line sentences
You can use :norm like this:
:g/There was/norm 0weldf.
This finds lines with "There was" then executes the normal commands 0weldf..
0: go to beginning of line
w: go to next word (in this case, "was")
e: go the end of the word (so cursor is on the 's' of "was")
l: move one character to the right (so we don't delete any of "was")
df.: delete until the next '.', inclusive.
If you want to keep the period use dt. instead of df..
If you don't want to delete from the beginning of the line and instead want to do sentences, the :%s command is probably more appropriate here. (e.g. :%s/\(There was\)[^.]*\./\1/g or %s/\(There was\)[^.]*\./\1./g if you want to keep the period at the end of the sentence.
Use search and replace:
:%s/There was[^.]*\.\s*//g
It happens sometimes that I have to look into various log and trace files on Windows and generally I use for the purpose VIM.
My problem though is that I still can't find any analog of grep -v inside of VIM: find in the buffer a line not matching given regular expression. E.g. log file is filled with lines which somewhere in a middle contain phrase all is ok and I need to find first line which doesn't contain all is ok.
I can write a custom function for that, yet at the moment that seems to be an overkill and likely to be slower than a native solution.
Is there any easy way to do it in VIM?
I believe if you simply want to have your cursor end up at the first non-matching line you can use visual as the command in your global command. So:
:v/pattern/visual
will leave your cursor at the first non-matching line. Or:
:g/pattern/visual
will leave your cursor at the first matching line.
you can use negative look-behind operator #<!
e.g. to find all lines not containing "a", use /\v^.+(^.*a.*$)#<!$
(\v just causes some operators like ( and #<! not to must have been backslash escaped)
the simpler method is to delete all lines matching or not matching the pattern (:g/PATTERN/d or :g!/PATTERN/d respectively)
I'm often in your case, so to "clean" the logs files I use :
:g/all is ok/d
Your grep -v can be achieved with
:v/error/d
Which will remove all lines which does not contain error.
It's probably already too late, but I think that this should be said somewhere.
Vim (since version about 7.4) comes with a plugin called LogiPat, which makes searching for lines which don't contain some string really easy. So using this plugin finding the lines not containing all is ok is done like this:
:LogiPat !"all is ok"
And then you can jump between the matching (or in this case not matching) lines with n and N.
You can also use logical operations like & and | to join different strings in one pattern:
:LP !("foo"|"bar")&"baz"
LP is shorthand for LogiPat, and this command will search for lines that contain the word baz and don't contain neither foo nor bar.
I just managed a somewhat klutzy procedure using the "g" command:
:%g!/search/p
This says to print out the non-matching lines... not sure if that worked, but it did end up with the cursor positioned on the first non-matching line.
(substitute some other string for "search", of course)
You can search with following line and press n to jump to the first non-matching line
^\(.*all is ok\)\#!.*$
Breakdown of operators:
^ -> means start of the line
\( and \) -> To match a whole string multiple times, it must be grouped into one item. This is done by putting "\(" before it and "\)" after it.
\#! -> Matches with zero width if the preceding atom does NOT match at the current position.
.* -> Matches any character repeated 1 or more times
$ -> end of the line
Here is sample animation how it works. For simplicity I searched for word apple.
You can iterate through the non-matches using g and a null substitution:
:g!/pattern/s/^//c
If you reply "n" each time you wont even mark the file as changed.
You need ctrl-C to escape from the circle (or keep going to bottom of file).