I know the thread.
I run
:%s/ /s/\n/g
I get
E488: Trailing characters
2nd example
I run
:%s/ /\n/g
I get
text^#text
I run the same codes also with the following settings separetaly
set fileformat=unix
and
set fileformat=dos
How can you replace with a new line in Vim?
:%s/ /Ctrl vReturn/g
Where Ctrl v is Control-key plus key v and Return is the return key (the one on the main keyboard, not the enter key on the numpad). The other characters are typed as usual.
If this is entered correctly, the sequence Ctrl vReturn will display as the characters ^M, typically in a different color, to indicate that they are special. Note that actually typing ^M will not work.
Also note that in Vim for windows, it's Control-q instead of Control-v (as that is paste).
Ctrl-v also allows entering other "special" keys via the keyboard. It is also useful for e.g. Tab or Backspace.
Try
%s/ /\r/g
Enter the following:
:s/ /
and now type Ctrl-V or Ctrl-Q (depends on your configuration) and hit the Enter key. You should now have:
:s/ /^M
Finish it off:
:s/ /^M/g
and you are good to go.
Specifically to answer your problem with trailing characters, this is the regex you specified:
:%s/ /s/\n/g
You have too many /. What happens is that you replace ' ' with s, and then you tag on this after the substitution: \n/g
I think you meant this:
:%s/ \s/\n/g
Note that your /s was changed to \s. Now the substitution will replace one space followed by one whitespace of any kind (space or tab) with \n. I doubt if this solve the problem or replacing space with a newline, but it should explain the error message.
Try either
For Unix:
:1,$s/\ /\n/g
For Windows:
:1,$s/\ /\r/g
This contains an escape character for the space.
Related
I am a new user of vim (gvim in windows), and have found abbreviations a nice time saver - however they would be even better if i could stop the trailing whitespace at times.
I have some directories that i use a lot, and so i added some abbreviation/path pairs to my _vimrc:
:ab diR1 C:/dirA/dira/dir1/
:ab diR2 C:/dirA/dirb/dir2/
etc ...
Now when i type diR1 <space> i get C:/dirA/dira/dir1/[]| where the whitespace is represented by [] and the cursor is the | character. I would like to get rid of the [] == whitespace.
This is a minor complaint: however you seem to be able to customise everthing else in Vim so i figured i'd ask -- is it possible to avoid the trailing whitespace when one uses abbreviations in vim?
An alternate tool used within Vim is a good answer - my objective is to save re-typing frequently used directory structures, but to have the cursor handy as i would almost always add something to the end, such as myFile.txt.
The trailing white space (doubtless due to the fact that the space triggered the abbreviation) which i backspace over before adding myFile.txt to the end is less annoying than typing the whole thing over and over, but it would be ideal if i could avoid doing so ...
pb2q answer is exactly what you want in your current scenario, but does not fully answer the question presented in the title. This exact problem is addressed in the vim help file. See :helpgrep Eatchar. The example it gives is this:
You can even do more complicated things. For example, to consume the space
typed after an abbreviation: >
func Eatchar(pat)
let c = nr2char(getchar(0))
return (c =~ a:pat) ? '' : c
endfunc
iabbr <silent> if if ()<Left><C-R>=Eatchar('\s')<CR>
You would put the Eatchar function in your ~/.vimrc file and then use like so in your abbreviations:
iabbr <silent> diR1 C:/dirA/dira/dir1/<c-r>=Eatchar('\m\s\<bar>/')<cr>
This would "eat" any trailing white space character or a slash. Note that I used iabbr instead of just abbr, because it is rare to actually want abbreviations to expand in command line mode. You must be careful with abbreviations in command line mode as they will expand in unexpected places such as searches and input() commands.
For more information see:
:h abbreviations
:helpgrep Eatchar
:h :helpgrep
This is possible, without more customization than just abbrev.
The abbreviation is being triggered by the space character, as you know. The space is a non-keyword character, and remains after the abbreviation is expanded.
But there are other ways to trigger the expansion, such as other non-keyword characters, including /. So if you instead define your abbreviations like this:
:ab diR1 C:/dirA/dira/dir1
That is, without the trailing path separator, then you can type diR1/, have the abbreviation expand for you because of the slash /, and continue typing, appending to your path with a file name.
Alternately, you can force abbreviation expansion using Ctrl-]. That is, type the abbreviation: diR1, with no following space or other non-keyword character, and then type Ctrl-]. The abbreviation will be expanded and you'll remain in insert mode, and can append your file name to the expanded path.
Check out :help abbreviations, there may be something else useful for you there, including more complicated constructions for always consuming e.g. the space character that triggered the abbreviation.
Instead of abbreviations, you could use mappings. They're expanded as soon as you have typed the last character of the mapping, so there won't be a trailing space:
:inoremap diR1 c:/dirA/dira/dir1
The downside for this approach is that the letters you type while a mapping could be expanded are not displayed until the mapping is finished. This takes some using used to.
I have the following characters being repeated at the end of every line:
^[[00m
How can I remove them from each line using the Vim editor?
When I give the command :%s/^[[00m//g, it doesn't work.
You could use :%s/.\{6}$// to literally delete 6 characters off the end of each line.
The : starts ex mode which lets you execute a command. % is a range that specifies that this command should operate on the whole file. The s stands for substitute and is followed by a pattern and replace string in the format s/pattern/replacement/. Our pattern in this case is .\{6}$ which means match any character (.) exactly 6 times (\{6}) followed by the end of the line ($) and replace it with our replacement string, which is nothing. Therefore, as I said above, this matches the last 6 characters of every line and replaces them with nothing.
I would use the global command.
Try this:
:g/$/norm $xxxxxx
or even:
:g/$/norm $5Xx
I think the key to this problem is to keep it generic and not specific to the characters you are trying to delete. That way the technique you learn will be applicable to many other situations.
Assuming this is an ANSI escape sequence, the ^[ stands for a single <Esc> character. You have to enter it by pressing Ctrl + V (or Ctrl + Q) on many Windows Vim installations), followed by Esc. Notice how this is then highlighted in a slightly different color, too.
It's easy enough to replace the last six characters of every line being agnostic to what those characters are, but it leaves considerable room for error so I wouldn't recommend it. Also, if ^[ is an escape character, you're really looking for five characters.
Escape code
Using ga on the character ^[ you can determine whether it's an escape code, in which case the status bar would display
<^[> 27, Hex 1b, Octal 033
Assuming it is, you can replace everything using
:%s/\%x1b\[00m$//gc
With \%x1b coming from the hex value above. Note also that you have to escape the bracket ([) because it's a reserved character in Vim regex. $ makes sure it occurs at the end of a line, and the /gc flags will make it global and confirm each replacement (you can press a to replace all).
Not escape code
It's a simple matter of escaping then. You can use either of the two below:
:%s/\^\[\[00m$//gc
:%s/\V^[[00m\$//gc
If they are all aligning, you can do a visual-block selection and delete it then.
Otherwise, if you have a sequence unknown how to input, you can visually select it by pressing v, then mark and yank it y (per default into register "). Then you type :%s/<C-R>"//g to delete it.
Note:
<C-R>" puts the content of register " at the cursor position.
If you yanked it into another register, say "ay (yank to register a - the piglatin yank, as I call it) and forgot where you put it, you can look at the contents of your registers with :reg.
<C-R> is Vim speak for Ctrl+R
This seems to work fine when the line is more than 5 chars long:
:perldo $_ = substr $_, 0, -5
but when the line is 5 or less chars long it does nothing.
Maybe there is a easy way in perl to delete the last 5 chars of a string, but I don't really know it:)
Use this to delete:
:%s/^[[00m//gc
I want to substitute all cygdrive/e with cygdrive/d using vim. But I can't get the matching pattern correctly. Here is my command:
s/cygdrive\/e/cygdrive\/d/g
it doesn't work. Can anybody show me what is wrong?
Thanks,
vim allows you to specify the delimiter.. (First character after s is the delimiter)
s/cygdrive\/e/cygdrive\/d/g
using line range argument .. and # as delimiter
ESC:
:1,$ s#/cygdrive/e#/cygdrive/d#g
Your search pattern and replacement string look fine.
Make sure you are in ex mode when you try it.
So press ESC, then : and then
%s/cygdrive\/e/cygdrive\/d/g
But if you want all he replacements in just the current line you can do:
s/cygdrive\/e/cygdrive\/d/g
You have to escape the special character
like this
s/cygdrive\/e/cygdrive\/d/g
There's a command in VIM where you can say how many chars to replace, and VIM will put a "$" at that many characters out, and you can type in the replacement for those characters. The original and new text can be different lengths. What's the command for this?
The nearest I can think of is '6s'; that deletes the next 6 characters and leaves you in insert mode, but it doesn't show a '$' at the end - it just removes the material.
It is the behavior of c command when 'cpoptions' contains $ (so it is a default behavior for vi and some configurations of Vim).
The command is s. In your example, it would be 6s.
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.