begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 09:40:40PM -0800: [snip] > I found the :s/// command in help. But I guess I needed help with > regular expressions since that's where I went way wrong. That, and my > command lacked the "%".
Ah! > You assumed "^" is "start of line". Yes, I did. :) > It's not. I'm assuming I need to > escape that too. "\^" But I'd like to verify each replacement. With > the s:/// command in help, it says to use "[c]" after the final "/". > (It does not say whether or not the braces are needed. It makes me > think that they are needed except that previously in the same command > they have "s[ubstitute]/".) It's common to use brackets to indicate optional bits; I don't know the origin, but it's been common practice for as long as I've been looking at computer manuals, and it seemed an established convention even then. > Anyway, you gave me what I needed. Yay! > I figured that if I try it and > something goes amiss, I can just abort without saving the file, then > just try again, which is what I did. Yup. > I had to make a few adjustments, but it finally worked. > :%s/\^\([0-9]\)\([A-Z]\)/\^\1 \2/c Yay! > I appended the c. I escaped the "^". And finally, I inserted "\^" in > front of "\1". I went through enough of them to be sure that all was > good, and then chose "a" (for "all"). That's 4,226 substitutions down > (after having done several hundred by hand). Heh. > Is "\1" and "\2" part of regular expressions? Or is that something > native to vi? Um, technically, no, as regular expressions are 'recognizers'. However, for regular-expressions-used-as-transformations, it's pretty common syntax. > Is there something simple (like a pamphlet) to explain *just* the basics > of regular expressions? There's a whole book: "Mastering Regular Expressions", and most vi, sed, and perl books have a section on the basics of regular expressions. Wikipedia has a decent history with a section some of the basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression > (I just noticed the drift from my subject line which happened before I > even sent it. It turns out that I started in "man vi", and very *very* > reluctantly started looking in "info vi". But I never had the patience > to learn the /language/ (so to speak) of "info". They should consider > setting up something like man or info in html.) There are manpages in html. All over the place. See http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi for one. > Also, in vi, how do I make ":set mouse=a" permanent? Put it in your .exrc (for vi, vim, and gvim), .vimrc (for vim and gvim), or .gvimrc (for just gvim), sans leading colon. -- Have the Vim book. Haven't read it yet. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
