In vim, is it possible to use regular expressions in abbreviations? For example, something like
:iab \([0-9]\{-}\)nm \\SI{\1}{\\nano\\meter}
would would expand every instance of, say, '50nm' to '\SI{50}{\nano\meter}'.
Your best bet is to write a little helper function to yourself. Tapping into omni completion or the user defined completion (C-x C-u, see :help 'cfu') is a good choice. I sketched a regular function to imap on a key:
function! ExpandNanometers()
let items = matchlist(expand('<cword>'), '\v(\d+)nm')
if len(items) == 0
return
endif
let modified = '\SI{' . items[1] . '}{\nano\meter}'
exec "normal! ciw" . modified
endf
imap <C-l> <C-o>:call ExpandNanometers()<CR>
Not the best code, perhaps. Bound on insert-mode C-l, it will replace words such as 50nm to the desired if the cursor is on the word or directly after it.
I wanted to add this as a comment to the previous answer, but apparently I can't until 50 rep. I also know this is wayyy too late, but for reference purposes:
If key mappings are acceptable (going by the prev. answer), surely something like
imap <silent> <leader>obscure-key-of-choice <Esc>:%s/\v(\d+)nm/\\SI{\1}{\\nano\\meter}/g<CR>``i
(i.e. global substitute on the whole file with the desired patterns)
would be easier to maintain? I like to avoid vimscript for readability/maintenance of the .vimrc! Obviously you replace obscure-key-of-choice by your obscure key of choice. You only have to do it once after having typed all the text anyway, so better save the other keys for more conventionally useful bindings!
The shortcut replaces something like
50nm blabla 73nm your-interesting-science-here 89nm
... some new lines...
we love nanometers nm! 34nm and finally 18nm
with something like
\SI{50}{\nano\meter} blabla \SI{73}{\nano\meter} your-interesting-science-here \SI{89}{\nano\meter}
... some new lines...
we love nanometers nm! \SI{34}{\nano\meter} and finally \SI{18}{\nano\meter}
Related
I want to create a lexer/parser for a language that has non-delimited strings.
Which part of the language is a string is defined by the command preceding it.
For example it has statements that look like this:
pause 5
alert Hello world[CRLF] this contains 'pause' once (1)
Alert in this instance can end with any string, including keywords and numbers.
Further complicating things, the text can contain tags like [CRLF] that I want to separate too.
Ideally I'd want this to be broken up into:
[PAUSE][INT 5]
[ALERT][STR "Hello world"][CRLF][STR " this contains 'pause' once (1)"]
I'm currently using flex but from what I've gathered this kind of thing isn't possible with flex.
How can I achieve what I want here?
(Since one of your tags is "regex", I'll suggest a non-flex approach.)
From the example, it seems like you could just:
match each line against ^(\w+) (.+) to obtain command and arguments-text, and then
get individual arguments by splitting the arguments-text on (\[\w+\]) (assuming your regex library's split function can return both the splitter-strings and the split-strings).
It's possible your actual situation is more complex and something like flex makes more sense, but I'm not really seeing it so far.
I'm pretty new to vim but I'm trying to create some C++ IDE.
I'm used to ctrl f (or ctrl-shift-f) to help me find in files.. so I saw a plugin I liked called pss.
I'd like to replace ctrl-f with something that would accept input but still add parameters of it's own(*.cpp for example)..
I was thinking of something like:
how can I do it correctly?
noremap <C-f>:Pss $1 *.cpp
Since you have editing capabilities in the command-line, a commonly used approach just builds an incomplete mapping. You can position the cursor in the edit location, like this:
:noremap <C-f> :Pss *.cpp<Left><Left><Left><Left><Left><Left>
After triggering the mapping (via <C-f>), you can insert the search pattern, and then trigger the search via <CR>.
Alternative
You can query for input via the input() function; its result can be inserted into the command-line via :execute:
:noremap <C-f> :execute 'Pss' input('Pattern: ') '*.cpp'<CR>
The default search hot-key is faster than the "Ctrl-F", you may type "/" in the normal mode, and continue input with your keywords. Once you need to search in many files, grep is your friend.
Background
I use JScript (Microsoft's ECMAScript implementation) for a lot of Windows system administration needs. This means I use a lot of ActiveX (Automated COM) objects. The methods of these objects often expect Number or Boolean arguments. For example:
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var a = fso.CreateTextFile("c:\\testfile.txt", true);
a.WriteLine("This is a test.");
a.Close();
(CreateTextFile Method on MSDN)
On the second line you see that the second argument is one that I'm talking about. A Boolean of "true" doesn't really describe how the method's behavior will change. This isn't a problem for me, but my automation-shy coworkers are easily spooked. Not knowing what an argument does spooks them. Unfortunately a long list of constants (not real constants, of course, since current JScript versions don't support them) will also spook them. So I've taken to documenting some of these basic function calls with inline block comments. The second line in the above example would be written as such:
var a = fso.CreateTextFile("c:\\testfile.txt", /*overwrite*/ true, /*unicode*/ false);
That ends up with a small syntax highlighting dilemma for me, though. I like my comments highlighted vibrantly; both block and line comments. These tiny inline block comments mean little to me, personally, however. I'd like to highlight those particular comments in a more muted fashion (light gray on white, for example). Which brings me to my dilemma.
Dilemma
I'd like to override the default syntax highlighting for block comments when both the beginning and end marks are on the same line. Ideally this is done solely in my vimrc file, and not in a superseding personal copy of the javascript.vim syntax. My initial attempt is pathetic:
hi inlineComment guifg=#bbbbbb
match inlineComment "\/\*.*\*\/"
Straight away you can see the first problem with this regular expression pattern is that it's a greedy search. It's going to match from the first "/*" to the last "*/" on the line, meaning everything between two inline block comments will get this highlight style as well. I can fix that, but I'm really not sure how to deal with my second concern.
Comments can't be defined inside of String literals in ECMAScript. So this syntax highlighting will override String highlighting as well. I've never had a problem with this in system administration scripts, but it does often bite me when I'm examining the source of many javascript libraries intended for browsers (less.js for example).
What regex pattern, syntax definition, or other solution would the amazing StackOverflow community recommend to restore my vimrc zen?
I'm not sure, but from your description it sounds like you don't need a new syntax definition. Vim syntax files usually let you override a particular syntax item with your own choice of highlighting. In this case, the item you want is called javaScriptComment, so a command like this will set its highlighting:-
hi javaScriptComment guifg=#bbbbbb
but you have to do this in your .vimrc file (or somewhere that's sourced from there), so it's evaluated before the syntax file. The syntax file uses the highlight default command, so the syntax file's choice of highlighting only affects syntax items with no highlighting set. See :help :hi-default for more details on that. BTW, it only works on Vim 5.8 and later.
The above command will change all inline /* */ comments, and leave // line comments with their default setting, because line comments are a different syntax item (javaScriptLineComment). You can find the names of all these groups by looking at the javascript.vim file. (The easiest way to do this is :e $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/javascript.vim .)
If you only want to change some inline comments, it's a little more complicated, but still easy to see what to do by looking at javascript.vim . If you do that, you can see that block comments are defined like this:-
syn region javaScriptComment start="/\*" end="\*/" contains=#Spell,javaScriptCommentTodo
See that you can use separate regexes for begin and end markers: you don't need to worry about matching the stuff in between with non-greedy quantifiers, or anything like that. To have a syntax item that works similarly but only on one line, try adding the oneline option (:h :syn-oneline for more details):-
syn region myOnelineComment start="/\*" end="\*/" oneline
I've removed the two contains groups because (1) if you're only using it for parameter names, you probably don't want spell-checking turned on inside these comments, and (2) contained sections that aren't oneline override the oneline in the container region, so you would still match all TODO comments with this region.
You can define this new kind of comment region in your .vimrc, and set the highlighting how you like: it looks like you already know how to do that, so I won't go into more details on that. I haven't tried out this particular example, so you may still need a bit of fiddling to make it work. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Why don't you simply add a comment line above the call?
I think that
// fso.CreateTextFile(filename:String, overwrite:Boolean, unicode:Boolean)
var a = fso.CreateTextFile("c:\\testfile.txt", true, false);
is a lot more readable and informative than
var a = fso.CreateTextFile("c:\\testfile.txt", /*overwrite*/ true, /*unicode*/ false);
I am using vim 7.x
I am using alternate file.
I have a mapping of *.hpp <--> *.cpp
Suppose I'm in
class Foo {
void some_me#mber_func(); // # = my cursor
}
in Foo.hpp
is there a way to tell vim to do the following:
Grab word under # (easy, expand("")
Look up the class I'm inside of ("Foo") <-- I have no idea how to do this
Append `1 & 2 (easy: using ".") --> "Foo::some_member_func"
4: Switch files (easy, :A)
Do a / on 4
So basically, I can script all of this together, except the "find the name of the enclosing class I'm in part (especially if classes are nested).
I know about ctags. I know about cscope. I'm choosing to not use them -- I prefer solutions where I understand where they break.
This is relatively easy to do crudely and very difficult to do well. C and C++ are rather complex languages to parse reliably. At the risk of being downvoted, I'd personally recommend parsing the tags file generated by ctags, but if you really want to do it in Vim, there are a few of options for the "crude" method.
Make some assumptions. The assumptions you make depend on how complicated you want it to be. At the simplest level: assume you're in a class definition and there are no other nearby braces. Based on your coding style, assume that the opening brace of the class definition is on the same line as "class".
let classlineRE = '^class\s\+\(\k\+\)\s\+{.*'
let match = search(classlineRE, 'bnW')
if match != 0
let classline = getline(match)
let classname = substitute(classline, classlineRE, '\1', '')
" Now do something with classname
endif
The assumptions model can obviously be extended/generalised as much as you see fit. You can just search back for the brace and then search back for class and take what's in between (to handle braces on a separate line to "class"). You can filter out comments. If you want to be really clever, you can start looking at what level of braces you're in and make sure it's a top level one (go to the start of the file, add 1 every time you see '{' and subtract one every time you see '}' etc). Your vim script will get very very very complicated.
Another one risking the downvote, you could use one of the various C parsers written in python and use the vim-python interface to make it act like a vim script. To be honest, if you're thinking of doing this, I'd stick with ctags/cscope.
Use rainbow.vim. This does highlighting based on depth of indentation, so you could be a little clever and search back (using search('{', 'bW') or similar) for opening braces, then interrogate the syntax highlighting of those braces (using synIDattr(synID(line("."), col("."),1), "name")) and if it's hlLevel0, you know it's a top-level brace. You can then search back for class and parse as per item 1.
I hope that all of the above gives you some food for thought...
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"ΒΆ + "/
...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.