I'm looking for a way to replace all dots in a line except the last one.
Example:
Blah - whatever - foo.bar.baz.avi should become
Blah - whatever - foo bar bar.avi
Since I'll have more than one line in the file and the amount of dots varies in each line I'm looking for a generic solution and not something like "Replace the first X matches" with X being a constant.
This seems to do the trick:
%s/\.\(.*\.\)\#=/ /g
\#= is a lookahead. It only matches a full stop if there are any following full stops.
See :help zero-width.
As a variation on the first answer you may prefer this syntax:
%s/\.\ze.*\./ /g
It let's you put the assertion that there be a following full stop after the search operator.
Another way that might be useful to learn (replace inside visual selection) would be:
:g/^/normal $F.hv0:s/\%V\./ /g^M
where ^M is entered with CTRL-V, Enter.
This means: for each line (g/^/) type $F.(go to last dot), visually select from character to the left till beginning of line (hv0), and then replace dots (:s/\./ /g^M) only inside visual selection (\%V).
Related
I'm wondering if there is a way to find a pattern, but restrict it to the current line. Basically, the equivalent of /PATTERN but restricted to the current line, rather than the entire document.
I've tried :s/PATTERN, but that deletes the pattern from the line and places my cursor at the beginning of the line, which is not at all what I need. I was hoping you could search without replacing...
I'm hoping to use this for a macro in order to place my cursor at the start of that pattern, as would happen when you do /PATTERN on the entire file, so anything that is macro-friendly is even better.
Any vim users out there that might have an idea?
EDIT: 0/PATTERN in a macro would work for my current need, but I'm hoping there's a more specific way to restrict the search.
ANSWER: There's a few ways posted in here so far, but the one I like best right now is using Shift+V to select the current line visually, followed by /\%V to search only in the visual selection. Then Shift+V again will turn off the visual mode.
My knowledge about macro is limited, but interactively, you can select current line with Shift + V, and then do /\%Vsearch (see http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/\%V).
try to Find first character of the Pattern by typing
f <letter>
It's not exactly what you need but can help to solve the problem.
/\%9lsearch
Where \%9 means line number 9.
Typing in the line number is still a bit lame. You can ctrl+r= followed by a vim expression and enter to evaluate the vim expression and insert its output. line('.') will return the line of the cursor.
In one complete step
/\%<c-r>=line('.')<cr>lsearch
For more help see:
:h /\%l
:h i_CTRL-R
Place the cursor on the line you want to search in
Select it with shift+v
Type / to begin searching
Prefix your term with \%V, e.g. \%Vabc to search for abc in only the visually selected blocks (in our case the single line)
You can search without replacing by using
:s/PATTERN//gc
Then press n to skip the replacement. If the pattern is not found, you won't even be asked.
You could also just highlight the current line or the range of lines.
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
I always wanted to know, how you can substitute within given parameters.
If you have a line like this:
123,Hello,World,(I am, here), unknown
and you wnat to replace World with Foobar then this is an easy task: :%s/World/Foobar/
Now I wonder how I can get rid of a , which is wihtin the ( ).
Theoretically I just have to find the first occurance of ( then substitute the , with a blank until ).
Try lookahead and lookbehind assertions:
%s/([^)]*\zs,\ze.*)//
(\zs and \ze tell where pattern starts and end)
or
%s/\(([^)]*\)\#<=,\(.*)\)\#=//
The first one is more readable, the second one uses \( ... \) groupings with parentheses inside groups which makes it look like obfuscated, and \#<= which apart from being a nice ASCII-art duck is the lookbehind operator, and \#= that is the lookahead operator.
References: :help pattern (more detail at :help /\#=, :help /\ze, etc.)
You use the GUI and want to try those commands? Copy them into the clipboard and run :#+ inside Gvim.
Modifying slightly the answer of #Tom can give you a quite good and "a bit" more readable result :
%s/\(.*\)(\(.*\),\(.*\))\(.*\)/\1(\2\3)\4/
That way you will have : in \1 will store what is at the left outside of the parenthesis, \4 what is at the right outside of the parenthesis and \2 and \3 what is inside the parenthesis, respectively on the left (\2) and on the right (\3).
With that you can easily swap your elements if your file is organised as column.
You can also select the text you want to change (either with visual or visual-block modes) and enter the : to start the replace command. vi will automatically start the command with :'<,'> which applies the command to the selected area.
Replacing a , can be done with:
:'<,'>s/,/ /g
For your example, this is the same thing as suggested by #ubuntuguy
%s/\(.*\)(\(.*\),\(.*\)/\1(\2\3
This will do the exact replacement you want.
Yet another approach, based on the fact that actually you want to substitute only the first occurrence of , inside the parenthesis:
:%s#\((.\{-}\),#\1 #
Explanation:
:%s for substitution in the whole file (don't use % if you want to work only with the current line)
we can use # or : as a delimiter to make the command more readable
in (.\{-} we ask to find any symbol (dot) after the left parenthesis and the rest stands for 0 or more occurrence (as few as possible) of this symbol. This expression is put inside \(...\) to be able to refer to this group as \1 in the future.
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).
Say I have ten lines and I want to prepend text to some word that occurs in those lines? It does not have to be at the beginning of the line.
From:
sdfsd foo sdfsd
sfsd foo fsdf
sdfsdf foo sdfsdf
to:
sdfsd bar(foo sdfsd
sfsd bar(foo fsdf
sdfsdf bar(foo sdfsdf
Is it also possible to not only prepend the bar( but actually surround foo with bar(foo)?
I would also like a quick way to append // comments to multiple lines (C-style comments).
I use Vim/GVim 7.2.
Go to the first foo, press Ctrl-v to enter visual block mode and press down until all the lines with foo are marked. Then press Shift-i to insert at the beginning (of the block). When you are finished and press Esc, the inserted characters will be added to each line at the left of the marked block.
To insert at the end, press again Ctrl-v, move up/down to mark all affected lines and then press End or $ to extend the selection until the end of the lines. Now you can press Shift-a to append at the end of all the lines, just like previously with Shift-i.
The visual selection can also be done with normal movement commands. So to comment a whole block in C you could move to the opening brace and type Ctrl-v % Shift-i // Esc.
To answer your first question, the below
:%s/foo/bar(&)/g
will look for foo, and surround the matched pattern with bar(). The /g will do this multiple times in one line.
Since you're just matching foo, you could do a simple :s/foo/bar(foo)/g. The above will work, however, if you decide to match on a regular expression rather than a simple word (e.g. f[a-z][a-z]). The '&' in the above represents what you've matched.
To prefix a set of lines I use one of two different approaches:
One approach is the block select (mentioned by sth). In general, you can select a rectangular region with ctrl-V followed by cursor-movement. Once you've highlighted a rectangle, pressing shift-I will insert characters on the left side of the rectangle, or shift-A will append them on the right side of the rectangle. So you can use this technique to make a rectangle that includes the left-most column of the lines you want to prefix, hit shift-I, type the prefix, and then hit escape.
The other approach is to use a substitution (as mentioned by Brian Agnew). Brian's substitution will affect the entire file (the % in the command means "all lines"). To affect just a few lines the easiest approach is to hit shift-V (which enables visual-line mode) while on the first/last line, and then move to the last/first line. Then type:
:s/^/YOUR PREFIX/
The ^ is a regex (in this case, the beginning of the line). By typing this in visual line mode you'll see '<,'> inserted before the s automatically. This means the range of the substitution will be the visual selection.
Extra tip: if your prefix contains slashes, you can either escape them with backslash, or you can use a different punctuation character as the separator in the command. For example, to add C++ line comments, I usually write:
:s:^:// :
For adding a suffix the substitution approach is generally easier unless all of your lines are exactly the same length. Just use $ for the pattern instead of ^ and your string will be appended instead of pre-pended.
If you want to add a prefix and a suffix simultaneously, you can do something like this:
:s/.*/PREFIX & SUFFIX/
The .* matches the whole line. The & in the replacement puts the matched text (the whole line) back, but now it'll have your prefix and suffix added.
BTW: when commenting out code you'll probably want to uncomment it later. You can use visual-block (ctrl-V) to select the slashes and then hit d to delete them, or you can use a substitution (probably with a visual line selection, made with shift-V) to remove the leading slashes like this:
:s:// ::
:normal to the rescue!
:%norm Wibar(
:%norm WEa)
:norm(al) replays the commands as if you had typed them:
W - goes to the next word
i - starts insertion mode
bar( - types the sequence 'bar('
Or in one line:
:%norm Wibar(ctrlvESCEa)
If you're running Windows then type ctrlq instead of ctrlv.
Yet another possibility (probably not-so-useful in your test case, but handy in other situations) is to cordon off the area you want to change with marks.
Put the cursor anywhere in the top line and press 'a
Put the cursor anywhere in the last line and press 'b
Issue the command :'a,'b s/foo/bar(&)/
I usually like visual block mode if everything is visible on the screen, and I usually prefer marks if the start and stop are separated by many screens.
Another simple regular expression is:
%s/^/<text you want to prepend>/
For the C-style comments, use the regexp answer by Brian, and match on line ending $, and insert away.