i have a piece of code like this
int a=8;
cout<<"a is :"<<a<<endl; // show what is the value of a
a=a*a;
string b="ice"; // b is ice
const char* c=b.c_str();
this code repeats at many places in exact same way. I want to find all the occurrence of this piece of code. I was thinking I could copy the code and put it into one of the registers and use the content of register to perform the matching. The text can have any of the special characters and while matching, it needs to be treated as ordinary text. Is it possible to match using the register content? in what other way I can accomplish the same?
Plugin
This becomes even easier by selecting the lines, and then searching for the visual selection, and you don't clobber a register through this. There are several plugins that extend the built-in normal mode * command to visual mode, also my SearchHighlighting plugin. (The plugin page has links to alternative plugins.)
Manually
If you want to do this manually, through a register, use a very nomagic (\V) pattern, and escape the special characters. To insert the (escaped) register contents into the command-line, insert register <C-R> with the expression register is used:
/\V<C-R>=substitute(escape(##, '/\'), '\n', '\\n', 'g')<CR><CR>
Related
I'm writing a long HOWTO in reStructuredText format and wondering if there's a way to let user specify values for a couple variables (hostname, ip address) at the top so the rest of the document would be filled with those automatically?
Like me, you are probably looking for substitution. At the bottom of the section you'll find how to replace text.
Substitution Definitions
Doctree element: substitution_definition.
Substitution definitions are indicated by an explicit markup start
(".. ") followed by a vertical bar, the substitution text, another
vertical bar, whitespace, and the definition block. Substitution text
may not begin or end with whitespace. A substitution definition block
contains an embedded inline-compatible directive (without the leading
".. "), such as "image" or "replace".
Specifically about text replacement:
Replacement text
The substitution mechanism may be used for simple macro substitution. This may be appropriate when the replacement text is
repeated many times throughout one or more documents, especially if it
may need to change later. A short example is unavoidably contrived:
|RST|_ is a little annoying to type over and over, especially
when writing about |RST| itself, and spelling out the
bicapitalized word |RST| every time isn't really necessary for
|RST| source readability.
.. |RST| replace:: reStructuredText
.. _RST: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
reStructuredText is a markup language to define static content. HTML content (I assumed the desired output format is HTML) is typically generated from reStructuredText on build time and then released/shipped to the user.
To allow users to specify variables, you would need a solution on top of reStructuredText, for example:
Ship the content with a JavaScript plugin that dynamically replaces specific strings in the HTML document with user input.
Generate the documentation on-the-fly after the user has specified the variables.
Note that these examples are not necessarily particularly viable solutions.
Is there any way to get data with in braces, before a certain latex command (\body) and assign that content (long text) to a variable.
eg:
\text{just a text before body} \body{contains lot of paragraphs etc
etc etc, and that paragraphs also contains lot of latex command like
\textbf{my name} and \textit{text} etc. but i want all the content
with in the brace} \text{just a text after body}
i need
\body{contains lot of paragraphs etc etc etc, and that paragraphs also
contains lot of latex command like \textbf{my name} and \textit{text}
etc. but i want all the content with in the brace}
in a variable
I want some search and replace in it. thats why
i did a macro to yank text with in braces by the help of % (to search with in braces).
is there any easy way to do this?
thanks in advance
You can assign everything inside the { to register a using
"ayi{
Breakdown is
"a - select register a
y - yank
i{ - everything inside {}
It does the right thing for matching braces
If you later need to access the contents of a you can do this in multiple different ways depending on the context - I think the ways are
"ap : paste register a in normal mode
<C-r>a : paste register a into command line
#a : access register in script
It's worth noting that regex is not powerful enough to do matching braces. (I think there are extensions that can make it powerful enough, but I'm not sure if vim supports any of those),
I have a long list of different names of universities. I'm trying to build a synonym table by collating lines with certain unique keywords; that is, in the file, I'll identify that Harvard is the keyword here:
Harvard Business School|
Harvard College|
Harvard School of Divinity|
and paste them into another file as
Harvard Business School|Harvard College|Harvard School of Divinity|
I have been doing this by searching for the word under the cursor, yanking lines with that word into register, pasting the register into the other file, and using the join command "J" to join the lines together:
[ clear register 'a' ]
0"ay0
[ move cursor to 'Harvard" and yank lines with keyword into register a ]
:g/\<<CTRL-R><CTRL-W>\>/y A
[ move to other screen and paste ]
"ap
[ join lines ]
JJJJJ
This works just fine, but I'd like it to be streamlined. Specifically, I would like to know how to remove newlines from a register so that I don't have to use JJJJ to manually join the lines in the last step. I'd like to search for all lines containing the word under the cursor, copy them into the 'a' register, remove newlines from the 'a' register, then paste the contents of the 'a' register.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I know:
how to search and replace globally, e.g. %s/\n//g
how to search and replace 'foo' in a buffer from a word to the contents of a register, e.g. :%s/foo/a/g
how to search for the contents of a register and replace with 'foo' in a buffer, e.g. :%s/a/bar/g
What I need to know:
how to search and replace 'foo' with 'bar' from register 'a' to register 'b'
how to search and replace 'foo' with 'bar' from register 'a' to register 'a'
To do it directly with text in register a you could use this command:
:let #a=substitute(strtrans(#a),'\^#',' ','g')
Then you should get results you want when you paste register a back in.
You don't need to remove newlines from register or press more then one J: with the following mapping it will be "apgVJ:
nnoremap <expr> gV "`[".getregtype(v:register)[0]."`]"
This mapping makes you able to select pasted text just after it was pasted. J on selected region joins all lines in region (unless region has only one line: here J acts like J without a selection, joining current line with next). gV tip can also be used to do substitution: "apgV:s/{pattern}/{replacement}<CR> is more convenient then using "ap:let #a=substitute(#a, '{pattern}', '{replacement}', '{flags}') unless you define some smart mapping.
Another tip is that register a can be cleared using qaq normal mode sequence: qa starts recording a new macro and q immediately stops it leaving empty string in a register where macro is recorded to.
Late to the game, but since everybody else seem to have solved the wrong problem
and since Google provided a solution for the problem that I had,
I feel obliged to provide my solution.
Accumulate pattern matches as one line in "a
:g/pattern/ norm "apkJ"addu
or using the unnamed register
:g/pattern/ norm pkJddu
It doesn't remove newlines in the register, since it doesn't have to.
If you remove the u at the end of the norm-code, it will consume already used lines in the file, that would perhaps make the manual processing of the file easier, since you don't have to read stuff that has already been taken care of.
Cite:
[ join lines ]
JJJJJ
A question, why not use 5J, or visual mode, or :%j (joins all lines in a file)?
Off topic:
"How do you mark text between "" in code blocks,
not to be colour coded?"
If I can assume your text file looks like the following:
Harvard Business School| Harvard
College| Harvard School of Divinity|
I would use
:%s/\n//g
to globally search and replace all \n new lines.
sometimes, you may need to use ^M (hit control+v and ENTER)
in place of \n.
I'm afraid your list may be more complicated then this, however, in which case my solution will be much too 'simple'
This is my string:
"this is my sentence"
I would like to have this output:
"sentence my is this"
I would like to select a few words on a line (in a buffer) and reverse it word by word.
Can anyone help me?
It's not totally clear what the context is here: you could be talking about text in a line in a buffer or about a string stored in a VimScript variable.
note: Different interpretations of the question led to various approaches and solutions.
There are some "old updates" that start about halfway through that have been rendered more or less obsolete by a plugin mentioned just above that section. I've left them in because they may provide useful info for some people.
full line replacement
So to store the text from the current line in the current buffer in a vimscript variable, you do
let words = getline('.')
And then to reverse their order, you just do
let words = join(reverse(split(words)))
If you want to replace the current line with the reversed words, you do
call setline('.', words)
You can do it in one somewhat inscrutable line with
call setline('.', join(reverse(split(getline('.')))))
or even define a command that does that with
command! ReverseLine call setline('.', join(reverse(split(getline('.')))))
partial-line (character-wise) selections
As explained down in the "old updates" section, running general commands on a character- or block-wise visual selection — the former being what the OP wants to do here — can be pretty complicated. Ex commands like :substitute will be run on entire lines even if only part of the line is selected using a character-wise visual select (as initiated with an unshifted v).
I realized after the OP commented below that reversing the words in a partial-line character-wise selection can be accomplished fairly easily with
:s/\%V.*\%V./\=join(reverse(split(submatch(0))))/
wherein
\%V within the RE matches some part of the visual selection. Apparently this does not extend after the last character in the selection: leaving out the final . will exclude the last selected character.
\= at the beginning of the replacement indicates that it is to be evaluated as a vimscript expression, with some differences.
submatch(0) returns the entire match. This works a bit like perl's $&, $1, etc., except that it is only available when evaluating the replacement. I think this means that it can only be used in a :substitute command or in a call to substitute()
So if you want to do a substitution on a single-line selection, this will work quite well. You can even pipe the selection through a system command using ...\=system(submatch(0)).
multiple-line character-wise selections
This seems to also work on a multiple-line character-wise selection, but you have to be careful to delete the range (the '<,'> that vim puts at the beginning of a command when coming from visual mode). You want to run the command on just the line where your visual selection starts. You'll also have to use \_.* instead of .* in order to match across newlines.
block-wise selections
For block-wise selections, I don't think there's a reasonably convenient way to manipulate them. I have written a plugin that can be used to make these sorts of edits less painful, by providing a way to run arbitrary Ex commands on any visual selection as though it were the entire buffer contents.
It is available at https://github.com/intuited/visdo. Currently there's no packaging, and it is not yet available on vim.org, but you can just git clone it and copy the contents (minus the README file) into your vimdir.
If you use vim-addon-manager, just clone visdo in your vim-addons directory and you'll subsequently be able to ActivateAddons visdo. I've put in a request to have it added to the VAM addons repository, so at some point you will be able to dispense with the cloning and just do ActivateAddons visdo.
The plugin adds a :VisDo command that is meant to be prefixed to another command (similarly to the way that :tab or :silent work). Running a command with VisDo prepended will cause that command to run on a buffer containing only the current contents of the visual selection. After the command completes, the buffer's contents are pasted into the original buffer's visual selection, and the temp buffer is deleted.
So to complete the OP's goal with VisDo, you would do (with the words to be reversed selected, and with the above-defined ReverseLine command available):
:'<,'>VisDo ReverseLine
old updates
...previous updates follow ... warning: verbose, somewhat obselete, and mostly unnecessary...
The OP's edit makes it more clear that the goal here is to be able to reverse the words contained in a visual selection, and specifically a character-wise visual selection.
This is decidedly not a simple task. The fact that vim does not make this sort of thing easy really confused me when I first started using it. I guess this is because its roots are still very much in the line-oriented editing functionality of ed and its predecessors and descendants. For example, the substitute command :'<,'>s/.../.../ will always work on entire lines even if you are in character-wise or block-wise (ctrlv) visual selection mode.
Vimscript does make it possible to find the column number of any 'mark', including the beginning of the visual selection ('<) and the end of the visual selection ('>). That is, as far as I can tell, the limit of its support. There is no direct way to get the contents of the visual selection, and there is no way to replace the visual selection with something else. Of course, you can do both of those things using normal-mode commands (y and p), but this clobbers registers and is kind of messy. But then you can save the initial registers and then restore them after the paste...
So basically you have to go to sort of extreme lengths to do with parts of lines what can easily done with entire lines. I suspect that the best way to do this is to write a command that copies the visual selection into a new buffer, runs some other command on it, and then replaces the original buffer's visual selection with the results, deleting the temp buffer. This approach should theoretically work for both character-wise and block-wise selections, as well as for the already-supported linewise selections. However, I haven't done that yet.
This 40-line code chunk declares a command ReverseCharwiseVisualWords which can be called from visual mode. It will only work if the character-wise visual selection is entirely on a single line. It works by getting the entire line containing the visual selection (using getline()) running a parameterized transformation function (ReverseWords) on the selected part of it, and pasting the whole partly-transformed line back. In retrospect, I think it's probably worth going the y/p route for anything more featureful.
" Return 1-based column numbers for the start and end of the visual selection.
function! GetVisualCols()
return [getpos("'<")[2], getpos("'>")[2]]
endfunction
" Convert a 0-based string index to an RE atom using 1-based column index
" :help /\%c
function! ColAtom(index)
return '\%' . string(a:index + 1) . 'c'
endfunction
" Replace the substring of a:str from a:start to a:end (inclusive)
" with a:repl
function! StrReplace(str, start, end, repl)
let regexp = ColAtom(a:start) . '.*' . ColAtom(a:end + 1)
return substitute(a:str, regexp, a:repl, '')
endfunction
" Replace the character-wise visual selection
" with the result of running a:Transform on it.
" Only works if the visual selection is on a single line.
function! TransformCharwiseVisual(Transform)
let [startCol, endCol] = GetVisualCols()
" Column numbers are 1-based; string indexes are 0-based
let [startIndex, endIndex] = [startCol - 1, endCol - 1]
let line = getline("'<")
let visualSelection = line[startIndex : endIndex]
let transformed = a:Transform(visualSelection)
let transformed_line = StrReplace(line, startIndex, endIndex, transformed)
call setline("'<", transformed_line)
endfunction
function! ReverseWords(words)
return join(reverse(split(a:words)))
endfunction
" Use -range to allow range to be passed
" as by default for commands initiated from visual mode,
" then ignore it.
command! -range ReverseCharwiseVisualWords
\ call TransformCharwiseVisual(function('ReverseWords'))
update 2
It turns out that doing things with y and p is a lot simpler, so I thought I'd post that too. Caveat: I didn't test this all too thoroughly, so there may be edge cases.
This function replaces TransformCharwiseVisual (and some of its dependencies) in the previous code block. It should theoretically work for block-wise selections too — it's up to the passed Transform function to do appropriate things with line delimiters.
function! TransformYankPasteVisual(Transform)
let original_unnamed = [getreg('"'), getregtype('"')]
try
" Reactivate and yank the current visual selection.
normal gvy
let #" = a:Transform(#")
normal gvp
finally
call call(function('setreg'), ['"'] + original_unnamed)
endtry
endfunction
So then you can just add a second command declaration
command! -range ReverseVisualWords
\ call TransformYankPasteVisual(function('ReverseWords'))
tangentially related gory detail
Note that the utility of a higher-level function like the ones used here is somewhat limited by the fact that there is no (easy or established) way to declare an inline function or block of code in vimscript. This wouldn't be such a limitation if the language weren't meant to be used interactively. You could write a function which substitutes its string argument into a dictionary function declaration and returns the function. However, dictionary functions cannot be called using the normal invocation syntax and have to be passed to call call(dictfunct, args, {}).
note: A more recent update, given above, obsoletes the above code. See the various sections preceding old updates for a cleaner way to do this.
Maybe:
:s/\v(.*) (.*) (.*) (.*)/\4 \3 \2 \1/
Of course you probably need to be more specific in the first part to find that particular sentence. Generally you can refer to match groups as \number with \0 being the whole match.
Here's a way to do by calling out to Ruby. After selecting the line you want to reverse, you can do this in command mode to replace it:
!ruby -e 'puts ARGF.read.strip.split(/\b/).reverse.join'
I found the solution myself thank to your answers and a lot of trying :)
This works:
function! Test()
exe 'normal ' . 'gv"ay'
let r = join(reverse(split(getreg('a'))))
let #a = r
exe 'normal ' . 'gv"ap'
endfunction
Didn't thought that I was enable to write such a function :)
I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace with regular expressions.
He said he's never wanted to do that, which was surprising since it's something I find myself doing all the time. However, off the top of my head I wasn't able to come up with more than one or two examples. Can anyone here offer some examples of times when they've found regex find/replace useful in their editor? Here's what I've been able to come up with since then as examples of things that I've actually had to do:
Strip the beginning of a line off of every line in a file that looks like:
Line 25634 :
Line 632157 :
Taking a few dozen files with a standard header which is slightly different for each file and stripping the first 19 lines from all of them all at once.
Piping the result of a MySQL select statement into a text file, then removing all of the formatting junk and reformatting it as a Python dictionary for use in a simple script.
In a CSV file with no escaped commas, replace the first character of the 8th column of each row with a capital A.
Given a bunch of GDB stack traces with lines like
#3 0x080a6d61 in _mvl_set_req_done (req=0x82624a4, result=27158) at ../../mvl/src/mvl_serv.c:850
strip out everything from each line except the function names.
Does anyone else have any real-life examples? The next time this comes up, I'd like to be more prepared to list good examples of why this feature is useful.
Just last week, I used regex find/replace to convert a CSV file to an XML file.
Simple enough to do really, just chop up each field (luckily it didn't have any escaped commas) and push it back out with the appropriate tags in place of the commas.
Regex make it easy to replace whole words using word boundaries.
(\b\w+\b)
So you can replace unwanted words in your file without disturbing words like Scunthorpe
Yesterday I took a create table statement I made for an Oracle table and converted the fields to setString() method calls using JDBC and PreparedStatements. The table's field names were mapped to my class properties, so regex search and replace was the perfect fit.
Create Table text:
...
field_1 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
field_2 VARCHAR2(10) NULL,
field_3 NUMBER(8) NULL,
field_4 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
....
My Regex Search:
/([a-z_])+ .*?,?/
My Replacement:
pstmt.setString(1, \1);
The result:
...
pstmt.setString(1, field_1);
pstmt.setString(1, field_2);
pstmt.setString(1, field_3);
pstmt.setString(1, field_4);
....
I then went through and manually set the position int for each call and changed the method to setInt() (and others) where necessary, but that worked handy for me. I actually used it three or four times for similar field to method call conversions.
I like to use regexps to reformat lists of items like this:
int item1
double item2
to
public void item1(int item1){
}
public void item2(double item2){
}
This can be a big time saver.
I use it all the time when someone sends me a list of patient visit numbers in a column (say 100-200) and I need them in a '0000000444','000000004445' format. works wonders for me!
I also use it to pull out email addresses in an email. I send out group emails often and all the bounced returns come back in one email. So, I regex to pull them all out and then drop them into a string var to remove from the database.
I even wrote a little dialog prog to apply regex to my clipboard. It grabs the contents applies the regex and then loads it back into the clipboard.
One thing I use it for in web development all the time is stripping some text of its HTML tags. This might need to be done to sanitize user input for security, or for displaying a preview of a news article. For example, if you have an article with lots of HTML tags for formatting, you can't just do LEFT(article_text,100) + '...' (plus a "read more" link) and render that on a page at the risk of breaking the page by splitting apart an HTML tag.
Also, I've had to strip img tags in database records that link to images that no longer exist. And let's not forget web form validation. If you want to make a user has entered a correct email address (syntactically speaking) into a web form this is about the only way of checking it thoroughly.
I've just pasted a long character sequence into a string literal, and now I want to break it up into a concatenation of shorter string literals so it doesn't wrap. I also want it to be readable, so I want to break only after spaces. I select the whole string (minus the quotation marks) and do an in-selection-only replace-all with this regex:
/.{20,60} /
...and this replacement:
/$0"¶ + "/
...where the pilcrow is an actual newline, and the number of spaces varies from one incident to the next. Result:
String s = "I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one "
+ "of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say "
+ "which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an "
+ "editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his "
+ "editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace "
+ "with regular expressions.";
The first thing I do with any editor is try to figure out it's Regex oddities. I use it all the time. Nothing really crazy, but it's handy when you've got to copy/paste stuff between different types of text - SQL <-> PHP is the one I do most often - and you don't want to fart around making the same change 500 times.
Regex is very handy any time I am trying to replace a value that spans multiple lines. Or when I want to replace a value with something that contains a line break.
I also like that you can match things in a regular expression and not replace the full match using the $# syntax to output the portion of the match you want to maintain.
I agree with you on points 3, 4, and 5 but not necessarily points 1 and 2.
In some cases 1 and 2 are easier to achieve using a anonymous keyboard macro.
By this I mean doing the following:
Position the cursor on the first line
Start a keyboard macro recording
Modify the first line
Position the cursor on the next line
Stop record.
Now all that is needed to modify the next line is to repeat the macro.
I could live with out support for regex but could not live without anonymous keyboard macros.