Regex search and replace in VI - regex

I have a document with lots of <swf...>.....</swf> in it. I would like to remove all these. Using vi when i type
:%s/\<swf[^\/swf>]+\/swf\>//g
I was hoping this would work, but it doesn't match anything.

You can remove all those from the buffer with this command:
:%s!<swf.\{-}/swf>!!
if you also have tags that might be split on two lines, you can add the \_ modifier to make . match newlines too:
:%s!<swf\_.\{-}/swf>!!
this assuming you want to remove both the tags and what they contain, if you just want to get rid of the tags and keep the content
:%s!</\?swf.\{-}>!!
Notes:
you don't need to escape < or >
you can choose whatever pattern delimiter you wish: Vim will use the first character you put after the s in the substitute command: this takes away the need to escape forward slashes in your pattern
EDIT: extending my answer after your comment
this is exactly like /STRING/REPLACE/g I only used a ! instead of / so that I don't have to quote the backslash in the pattern (see my second point above)
I didn't add the g modifier at the end since I have :set gdefault in my .vimrc since forever (it means that by default Vim will substitute all matches in a line instead of just the first, thus reverting the meaning of /g)
\{-} is the "ungreedy" version of the * quantifier, i.e. it matches 0 or more of the preceding atom but take as few as possible -- this helps you make sure that your search pattern will extend to the first "closing tag" instead of the last.
HTH

The problem here is that the [] is a character class, so you are telling it that between the swf opening and closing tags, the letters s, w and f cannot appear anywhere, in any order.
You could try a non-greedy match instead:
\<swf.\{-}\/swf\>
Note that . does not allow newline by default.
I don't use Vim though, so I used this guide to discover the syntax. I hope it is correct.

Related

Search string enclosed in quotes in Vim

In vim I need to search all strings in quotes e.g. 'foo'
Does one see the problem in this regex? E486: Pattern not found \'([^']*)'
:\/'([^']*)'
Regex Tester
First problem is that your use of find is a bit confusing. If you want
to just find, use /. The colon is not necessary (which indicates
command mode). If you're using the find as a range (basically the same
thing, / is just an empty command with a range) you can use the colon,
but either way escaping the first slash is not necessary.
The other main problem is that parenthesis by default need to be escaped
if you meant a capturing group. All of this is dependant on your
'magic' option reading the help for the /magic topic (you can do a
:h magic) is highly recommended. With "vanilla" Vim settings, the
regex you need looks live this:
/'\([^']*\)'
With very magic enable (by using the \v atom) this can be simplified
to your original design:
/\v'([^']*)'
Alternatively you can use
\v'(\a+)'
this regex performs similar than yours, except when nested quotes are encountered. In the text:
The user's first 'answer'.
The regex \v'(\a+)' will capture answer while your original regex (corrected by sidyll) \v'([^']*)' will capture 's first '.

Regex to find two words on the page

I'm trying to find all pages which contain words "text1" and "text2".
My regex:
text1(.|\n)*text2
it doesn't work..
If your IDE supports the s (single-line) flag (so the . character can match newlines), you can search for your items with:
(text1).*(text2)|\2.*\1
Example with s flag
If the IDE does not support the s flag, you will need to use [\s\S] in place of .:
(text1)[\s\S]*(text2)|\2[\s\S]*\1
Example with [\s\S]
Some languages use $1 and $2 in place of \1 and \2, so you may need to change that.
EDIT:
Alternately, if you want to simply match that a file contains both strings (but not actually select anything), you can utilize look-aheads:
(?s)^(?=.*?text1)(?=.*?text2)
This doesn't care about the order (or number) of the arguments, and for each additional text that you want to search for, you simply append another (?=.*?text_here). This approach is nice, since you can even include regex instead of just plain strings.
text0[\s\S]*text1
Try this.This should do it for you.
What this does is match all including multiline .similar to having .*? with s flag.
\s takes care of spaces,newlines,tabs
\S takes care any non space character.
If you want the regex to match over several lines I would try:
text1[\w\W]*text2
Using . is not a good choice, because it usually doesn't match over multiple lines. Also, for matching single characters I think using square brackets is more idiomatic than using ( ... | ... )
If you want the match to be order-independent then use this:
(?:text1[\w\W]*text2)|(?:text2[\w\W]*text1)
Adding a response for IntelliJ
Building on #OnlineCop's answer, to swap the order of two expressions in IntelliJ,you would style the search as in the accepted response, but since IntelliJ doesn't allow a one-line version, you have to put the replace statement in a separate field. Also, IntelliJ uses $ to identify expressions instead of \.
For example, I tend to put my nulls at the end of my comparisons, but some people prefer it otherwise. So, to keep things consistent at work, I used this regex pattern to swap the order of my comparisons:
Notice that IntelliJ shows in a tooltip what the result of the replacement will be.
For me works text1*{0,}(text2){0,}.
With {0,} you can decide to get your keyword zero or more times OR you set {1,x} to get your keyword 1 or x-times (how often you want).

Regex negation in vim

In vim I would like to use regex to highlight each line that ends with a letter, that is preceeded by neither // nor :. I tried the following
syn match systemverilogNoSemi "\(.*\(//\|:\).*\)\#!\&.*[a-zA-Z0-9_]$" oneline
This worked very good on comments, but did not work on lines containing colon.
Any idea why?
Because with this regex vim can choose any point for starting match for your regular expression. Obviously it chooses the point where first concat matches (i.e. does not have // or :). These things are normally done by using either
\v^%(%(\/\/|\:)#!.)*\w$
(removed first concat and the branch itself, changed .* to %(%(\/\/|\:)#!.)*; replaced collection with equivalent \w; added anchor pointing to the start of line): if you need to match the whole line. Or negative look-behind if you need to match only the last character. You can also just add anchor to the first concat of your variant (you should remove trailing .* from the first concat as it is useless, and the branch symbol for the same reason).
Note: I have no idea why your regex worked for comments. It does not work with comments the way you need it in all cases I checked.
does this work for you?
^\(\(//\|:\)\#<!.\)*[a-zA-Z0-9_]$

Replace while keeping certain "words" in vi/vim

For example, if I have $asd['word_123'] and I wanted to replace it with $this->line('word_123'), keeping the 'word_123'. How could I do that?
By using this:
%s/asd\[\'.*\'\]/this->line('.*')/g
I will not be able to keep the wording in between. Please enlighten me.
Using regex, you could do something like :%s/\$asd\['\([^']*\)'\]/$this->line('\1')/g
Step by step:
%s - substitute on the whole file
\$asd\[' - match "$asd['". Notice the $ and [ need to be escaped since these have special meaning in regex.
\([^']*\) - the \( \) can be used to select what's called an "atom" so that you can use it in the replacement. The [^'] means anything that is not a ', and * means match 0 or more of them.
'\] - finishes our match.
$this->line('\1') - replaces with what we want, and \1 replaces with our matched atom from before.
g - do this for multiple matches on each line.
Alternative (macro)
Instead of regex you could also use a macro. For example,
qq/\$asd<Enter>ct'$this->line(<Esc>f]r)q
then #q as many times as you need. You can also ## after you've used #q once, or you can 80#q if you want to use it 80 times.
Alternative (:norm)
In some cases, using :norm may be the best option. For example, if you have a short block of code and you're matching a unique character or position. If you know that "$" only appears in "$asd" for a particular block of code you could visually select it and
:norm $T$ct'this->line(<C-v><Esc>f]r)<Enter>
For a discourse on using :norm more effectively, read :help :norm and this reddit post.
Try using
:%s/\$asd\[\'\([^\']\+\)\'\]/$this->line('\1')/g

Adding "/index.html" to paths in Vim

I'm trying to append "/index.html" to some folder paths in a list like this:
path/one/
/another/index.html
other/file/index.html
path/number/two
this/is/the/third/path/
path/five
sixth/path/goes/here/
Obviously the text only needs to be added where it does not exist yet. I could achieve some good results with (vim command):
:%s/^\([^.]*\)$/\1\/index.html/
The only problem is that after running this command, some lines like the 1st, 5th and 7th in the previous example end up with duplicated slashes. That's easy to solve too, all I have to do is search for duplicates and replace with a single slashes.
But the question is:
Isn't there a better way to achieve the correct result at once?
I'm a Vim beginner, and not a regex master also. Any tips are really appreciated!
Thanks!
So very close :)
Just add an optional slash to the end of the regex:
\/\?
Then you need to change the rest of the pattern to a non-greedy match so that it ignores a trailing slash. The syntax for a non-greedy match in vim (replacing the *) is:
\{-}
So we end up with:
:%s/^\([^\.]\{-}\)\/\?$/\1\/index.html/
(Doesn't hurt to be safe and escape the period.)
Vim's regex supports the ability to match a bit of text foo if it does or doesn't precedes or follows some other text bar without matching bar, and this is exactly the sort of thing you're looking for. Here you want to match the end of line with an optional /, but only if the / isn't followed by index.html, and then replace it with /index.html. A quick look at Vim's help tells me \#<! is exactly what to use. It tells Vim that the preceding atom must be in the text but not in what's matched. With a little experimentation, I get
:%s;/\?\(index\.html\)\#<!$;/index.html;
I use ; to delimit the parts of the :s command so that I don't have to escape any / in the regex or replacement expression. In this particular situation, it's not a big deal though.
The / is optional, and we say so with \?.
We need to group index.html together because otherwise our special \#<! would only affect the l otherwise.