I'm not at all familiar with Vim but I'm working with large text files (~1G) and my standard text editors weren't cutting it.
My files are currently in this format:
Arbitrary_title_of_sequenceA
SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1
SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2
Arbitrary_title_of_sequenceB
SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1
SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2
I need a convenient way of appending the "SEQ2" line to the "SEQ1" line like so:
Arbitrary_title_of_sequenceA
SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2
Arbitrary_title_of_sequenceB
SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ1SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2SEQ2
Considering the size of these files, doing each line separately isn't really an option. Any help would be much appreciated!
What about providing a correct sample to begin with?
:g/SEQ1/norm Jx
does what I think you want.
:g/SEQ1 is the :global command which allows you to act on each line containing the pattern SEQ1. See :help :global.
norm is the :normal command that you use to perform a normal mode command, here on every line matched by :g/SEQ1. See :help :normal.
After that comes the normal command in question:
J is used to join the current line with the line below.
x is used to remove the <Space> automatically added by Vim.
:1,$s/\(.*\n\)\(.*\)\n\(.*\n\)/\1\2\3/
1,$ -> range is all file
s/PAT1/PAT2/ -> substitute PAT1 with PAT2
.* -> match any character except new line
\n -> match new line
\(PAT1\) -> capture/remember the string that matched PAT1
\1,\2,\3 -> refers to the captured string for captures in order
Also using sed instead of vim should be faster:
sed -i 'n;N;s/\n/ /' input_file
This can be summarized as:
Read a line
Read another line and print previous line (n)
Read another line and append it to the previous line (N)
find the first newline and change it to space (s/\n/ /)
print the line (or merged lines)
I think romainl's solution is the best if you have a reliable "SEQ1" pattern you can grab onto. If not and you want to literally join every third line, you could easily do this with a macro:
qqjJxjq
Hit G to see how many lines are in the file and just repeat the macro that many times (it doesn't matter that it's higher than you need). So if the file was 1000 lines you could do 1000#q. This kind of solution is easy to remember and integrate into your normal workflow.
Related
I would like to insert at the end of each line the number of alphabetic characters on that line. To do this on one line is easy. I search using :s/\a//gn and get the occurrence of alphabetic characters in the command line and then A and space and enter the number.
My problem arises when I have so many lines that it becomes extremely tedious to do this. I am trying to create a macro but am having difficulty getting command line output into it. Is there a way to do this without resorting to *nix commands? I have access to a *nix box but not all the time.
So if my file had the following content:
abc2d4s
jd4a5ag
jdf7fjf
abdd5ff
I would like the output to look like this:
abc2d4s 5
jd4a5ag 5
jdf7fjf 6
abdd5ff 6
I was thinking if there was a way to get the replace output piped into the register somehow but cannot figure out how to do it, but maybe there is a better way.
You can capture the output of the :s///gn command with :redir, but in this case, I would rather implement the counting via substitute() and :help sub-replace-expression:
:%s/.*/\=submatch(0) . ' ' . len(substitute(submatch(0), '\A', '', 'g'))/
This matches the entire line (.*), then removes all non-alphabetic characters (\A), and appends the length of the result. Note: Works only for ASCII characters (but \a covers only those, anyway)!
this cmd should give you that output:
%s/.*/\=submatch(0).' '.(len(submatch(0))-len(substitute(submatch(0),'\a','','g')))
One way to do that would be to use a simple macro:
:%norm A <C-v><C-r>=col('.')-2<C-v><CR>
which should look like:
:%norm A ^R=col('.')-2^M
where we enter insert mode at the end of each line and insert a space followed by the column number of the last character.
A variant:
:%norm A^R=" ".len(getline('.'))^M
I'd like to replace current string line with another (for example the another line is placed in 5 lines above current line). I can do it with a pair of commands
dd
:-5t-1
Is there the shorter way to obtain same goal?
dd
:-5t-1
is already pretty short if you ask me. But you can squeeze everything into a one-liner:
:d|-5t-1
and remove the 1 because it's implied by -:
:d|-5t-
Barring making a custom command or mapping I don't see how you could make it shorter.
:-5y<CR>Vp
is it shorter?
if you need do that really often, add this into your vimrc:
command! -range R d|<line1>,<line2>t-
then you can just do :-5R replace current line with -5 line
or 2,4R to cp line 2-4 (3 lines) to current line, and replace current line.
If you don't mind a plugin, my LineJuggler plugin offers a ]r command (and many more):
]r Fetch the line [count] visible lines above the current line and replace the current line with it.
With it, your example would be the short and easy 5]r
In addition, the companion LineJugglerCommands plugin now offers a similar :Replace Ex command. Again, your example would be
:Replace -5
I'm reviewing some logs with Java exception spam. The spam is getting is making it hard to see the other errors.
Is is possible in vim to select a block of text, using visual mode. Delete that block every place it occurs in the file.
If vim can't do it, I know silly question, vim can do everything. What other Unix tools might do it?
Sounds like you are looking for the :global command
:g/pattern/d
The :global command takes the form :g/{pat}/{cmd}. Read it as: run command, {cmd}, on every line matching pattern, {pat}.
You can even supply a range to the :delete (:d for short) command. examples:
:,+3d
:,/end_pattern/d
Put this togehter with the :global command and you can accomplish a bunch. e.g. :g/pat/,/end_pat/d
For more help see:
:h :g
:h :d
:h :range
Vim
To delete all matching lines:
:g/regex/d
To only delete the matches themselves:
:%s/regex//g
In either case, you can copy the visual selection to the command line by yanking it and then inserting it with <C-r>". For example, if your cursor (|) is positioned as follows:
hello wo|rld
Then you can select world with viw, yank the selection with y, and then :g/<C-r>"/d.
sed
To delete all matching lines:
$ sed '/regex/d' file
To only delete the matches themselves:
$ sed 's/regex//g' file
grep
To delete all matching lines:
$ grep -v 'regex' file
grep only operates line-wise, so it's not possible to only delete matches within lines.
you can try this in vim
:g/yourText/ d
Based on our discussion in the comments, I guess a "block" means several complete lines. If the first and last lines are distinctive, then the method you gave in the comments should work. (By "distinctive" I mean that there is no danger that these lines occur anywhere else in your log file.)
For simplifications, I would use "ay$ to yank the first line into register a and "by$ to yank the last line into register b instead of using Visual mode. (I was going to suggest "ayy and "byy, but that wold capture the newlines)
To be on the safe side, I would anchor the patterns: /^{text}$/ just in case the log file contains a line like "Note that {text} marks the start of the Java exception." On the command line, I would use <C-R>a and <C-R>b to paste in the contents of the two registers, as you suggested.
:g/^<C-R>a$/,/^<C-R>b$/d
What if the yanked text includes characters with special meaning for search patterns? To be on the really safe side, I would use the \V (very non-magic) modifier and escape any slashes and backslashes:
:g/\V\^<C-R>=escape(#a, '/\')<CR>\$/,/\V\^<C-R>=escape(#b, '/\')<CR>\$/d
Note that <C-R>= puts you on a fresh command line, and you return to the main one with <CR>.
It is too bad that \V was not available when matchit was written. It has to deal with text from the buffer in a search pattern, much like this.
Suppose I'm editing the following document (* = cursor):
Lions
Tigers
Kittens
Puppies
*
Humans
What sequence can I use to delete the surrounding white space so that I'm left with:
Lions
Tigers
Kittens
Puppies
*
Humans
Note: I'm looking for an answer that handles any number of empty lines, not just this exact case.
EDIT 1: Line numbers are unknown and I only want to effect the span my cursor is in.
EDIT 2: Edited example to show I need to preserve leading whitespace on edges
Thanks
Easy. In normal mode, dipO<Esc> should do it.
Explanation:
dip on a blank line deletes it and all adjacent blank lines.
O<Esc> opens a new empty line, then goes back to normal mode.
Even more concise, cip<Esc> would roll these two steps into one, as suggested by #Lorkenpeist.
A possible solution is to use the :join command with a range:
:?.?+1,/./-1join!
Explanation:
[range]join! will join together a [range] of lines. The ! means with out inserting any extra space.
The starting point is to search backwards to the first character then down 1 line, ?.?+1
As the 1 in +1 can be assumed this can be abbreviated ?.?+
The ending point is to search forwards to the next character then up 1 line, /./-1
Same as before the 1 can be assumed so, /./-
As we are using the same pattern only searching forward the pattern can be omitted. //-
The command :join can be shorted to just :j
Final shortened command:
:?.?+,//-j!
Here are some related commands that might be handy:
1) to delete all empty lines:
:g/^$/d
:v/./d
2) Squeeze all empty lines into just 1 empty line:
:v/./,//-j
For more help see:
:h :j
:h [range]
:h :g
:h :v
Short Answer: ()V)kc<esc>
In normal mode, if you type () your cursor will move to the first blank line. ( moves the cursor to the beginning of the previous block of non-blank lines, and ) moves the cursor to the end (specifically, to the first blank line after said block). Then a simple d) will delete all text until the beginning of the next non-blank line. So the complete sequence is ()d).
EDIT: You're right, that deletes the whitespace at the beginning of the next non-blank line. Instead of d) try V)kd. V puts you in visual line mode, ) jumps to the first non-blank line (skipping the whitespace at the beginning of the line), k moves the cursor up one line. At this point you've selected all the blank lines, so d deletes the selection.
Finally, type O (capital O) followed by escape to crate a new blank line to replace the ones you deleted. Alternatively, replacing dO<Escape> with c<Escape> does the same thing with one less keystroke, so the entire sequence would be ()V)kc<Esc>.
These answers are irrelevant after the updated question:
This may not be the answer you want to hear, but I would make use of ranges. Take a look at the line number for the first empty line (let's say 55 for example) and the second to last empty line (perhaps 67). Then just do :55,67d.
Or, perhaps you only want there to ever be one empty line in your whole file. In that case you can match any occurrence of one or more empty lines and replace them with one empty line.
:%s/\(^$\n\)\+/\r/
This answer works:
If you just want to use normal mode you could search for the last line with something on it. For instance,
/.<Enter>kkVNjd
I didn't test so much, but it should work for your examples. There maybe more elegant solutions.
function! DelWrapLines()
while match(getline('.'),'^\s*$')>=0
exe 'normal kJ'
endwhile
exe 'silent +|+,/./-1d|noh'
exe 'normal k'
endfunction
source it and try :call DelWrapLines()
I know this question has already been resolved, but I just found a great solution in "sed & awk, 2nd Ed." (O'Reilly) that I thought was worth sharing. It does not use vim at all, but instead uses sed. This script will replace all instances of one or more blank lines (assuming there is no whitespace in those lines) with a single blank line. On the command line:
sed '/ˆ$/{
N
/ˆ\n$/D
}' myfile
Keep in mind that sed does not actually edit the file, but instead prints the edited lines to standard output. You can redirect this input to a file:
sed '/ˆ$/{
N
/ˆ\n$/D
}' myfile > tempfile
Be careful though, if you try to write it directly to myfile, it will just delete the entire contents of the file, which is clearly not what you want! After you write the output to tempfile, you can just mv tempfile myfile and tada! All instances of multiple blank lines are replaced by a single blank line.
Even better:
cat -s myfile > temp
mv temp myfile
cat is awesome, yes?
Bestest:
If you want to do it inside vim, you can replace all instances of multiple blank lines with a single blank line by using vim's handy feature of executing shell commands on a range of lines within vim.
:%!cat -s
That's all it takes, and your entire file is reformatted all nice!
How can I add line numbers to a range of lines in a file opened in Vim? Not as in :set nu—this just displays line numbers—but actually have them be prepended to each line in the file?
With
:%s/^/\=line('.')/
EDIT: to sum up the comments.
This command can be tweaked as much as you want.
Let's say you want to add numbers in front of lines from a visual selection (V + move), and you want the numbering to start at 42.
:'<,'>s/^/\=(line('.')-line("'<")+42)/
If you want to add a string between the number and the old text from the line, just concatenate (with . in VimL) it to the number-expression:
:'<,'>s/^/\=(line('.')-line("'<")+42).' --> '/
If you need this to sort as text, you may want to zero pad the results, which can be done using printf for 0001, 0002 ... instead of 1, 2... eg:
:%s/^/\=printf('%04d', line('.'))/
Anyway, if you want more information, just open vim help: :h :s and follow the links (|subreplace-special|, ..., |submatch()|)
cat -n adds line numbers to its input. You can pipe the current file to cat -n and replace the current buffer with what it prints to stdout. Fortunately this convoluted solution is less than 10 characters in vim:
:%!cat -n
Or, if you want just a subselection, visually select the area, and type this:
:!cat -n
That will automatically put the visual selection markers in, and will look like this after you've typed it:
:'<,'>!cat -n
In order to erase the line numbers, I recommend using control-v, which will allow you to visually select a rectangle, you can then delete that rectangle with x.
On a GNU system: with the external nl binary:
:%!nl
With Unix-like environment, you can use cat or awk to generate a line number easily, because vim has a friendly interface with shell, so everything work in vim as well as it does in shell.
From Vim Tip28:
:%!cat -n
or
:%!awk '{print NR,$0}'
But, if you use vim in MS-DOS, of win9x, win2000, you loss these toolkit.
here is a very simple way to archive this only by vim:
fu! LineIt()
exe ":s/^/".line(".")."/"
endf
Or, a sequence composed with alphabet is as easy as above:
exe "s/^/".nr2char(line("."))."/"
You can also use a subst:
:g/^/exe ":s/^/".line(".")."^I/"
You can also only want to print the lines without adding them to the file:
"Sometimes it could be useful especially be editing large source files to print the line numbers out on paper.
To do so you can use the option :set printoptions=number:y to activate and :set printoptions=number:n to deactivate this feature.
If the line number should be printed always, place the line set printoptions=number:y in the vimrc."
First, you can remove the existing line numbers if you need to:
:%s/^[0-9]*//
Then, you can add line numbers. NR refers to the current line number starting at one, so you can do some math on it to get the numbering you want. The following command gives you four digit line numbers:
:%!awk '{print 1000+NR*10,$0}'
The "VisIncr" plugin is good for inserting columns of incrementing numbers in general (or letters, dates, roman numerals etc.). You can control the number format, padding, and so on. So insert a "1" in front of every line (via :s or :g or visual-block insert), highlight that column in visual-block mode, and run one of the commands from the plugin.
If someone wants to put a tab (or some spaces) after inserting the line numbers using the this excellent answer, here's a way. After going into the escape mode, do:
:%s/^/\=line('.').' '/
^ means beginning of a line and %s is the directive for substitution. So, we say that put a line number at the beginning of each line and add 4 spaces to it and then put whatever was the contents of the line before the substitution, and do this for all lines in the file.
This will automatically substitute it. Alternatively, if you want the command to ask for confirmation from you, then do:
:%s/^/\=line('.').' '/igc
P.S: power of vim :)
The best reply is done in a duplicate question.
In summary:
with CTRL-V then G I 0 You can insert a column of zero.
Then select the whole column and increment:
CTRL-V g CTRL-A
See also: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Making_a_list_of_numbers#Incrementing_selected_numbers