On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Rogan Creswick <[email protected]> wrote: >> I need to remove double quotes from a specific column for all 3200 lines >> in a file. I know that I can do a regex search and replace for the beginning >> of each line, but the quotes I need to remove are in the interior. It seems >> to me that there is a way to block a vertical column and manipulate text >> within that marked block, but I no longer remember how to do this. > > Put the cursor on the first column of the text you want to remove, set > the mark (c-space), move to the last row, and one colum *past* the > right-most column you want to remove, and then run kill-rectangle (c-x > r k). There are a few other foo-rectangle commands, but I don't know > them well, other than yank-rectangle (c-x r y).
After reading your email again, I realized that I probably didn't actually answer your question. I'm still not sure I know the best way, but you can do manipulations on a specific rectangle by using kill-rectangle as described above, then yanking that rectangle into *scratch*, do your manipulations in *scratch*, then kill-rectangle the modified rect again to get it into the kill-ring. Finally, you can yank-rectangle right back into your original buffer at the same location you first set the mark. yank-rectangle should shift all the old text back over to make room for the newly modified rectangle of content. There are also some promising foo-rectangle functions that may do this more elegantly (eg: apply-on-rectangle) but I haven't taken the time to puzzle out how to use them. M-x apropos on 'rectangle' may help you out. --Rogan _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
