RE: Substitute tabs for specific column locations
-Original Message-
From: Tim Chase [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 11:08 PM
To: David Fishburn
Cc: vim@vim.org
Subject: Re: Substitute tabs for specific column locations
So for each row, replace the tab with an appropriate number of
spaces to ensure that column 2 (no matter the length of
column 1) will
always start in column 20. The same for column 3, but
starting at column 25.
This is my poor man's formatting utility. I can change the
input in
anyway I want (additional tabs or newline characters,
strings and so
on). I just cannot line it up appropriately before my
plugin gets it
to display it on the screen.
I was hoping I could do 1 substitute command that would do
something
like
this:
s/\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\n/\1\%20c\2\%25c\3\r/g
You have to tweak the spacing yourself, manually-ish. Vim7
provides a repeat() function that, in earlier versions, you'd
have to recreate yourself. Thus, you can do something like
this one-liner (broken into several lines to make the parts
more obvious)
:%s/^\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)/\=
matchstr(submatch(1).repeat(' ', 20), '^.\{20}').
matchstr(submatch(2).repeat(' ', 25), '^.\{25}').
submatch(3)
As usual Tim, bang on.
I realized this technique would not work for me since we are limited to the
use of only 9 back references. I could do this in a loop, but I took a
different approach and let the Perl code that generated the block in the
first place take care of the formatting. Turned out pretty easy and fast
using that approach.
Thanks for the help.
Dave
Substitute tabs for specific column locations
Vim 7
WinXP SP2
I have a string in this format:
\nr1c1\tr1c2\tr1c3\t\nr2c1\tr2c2\tr2c3\t\nr3c1\tr3c2\tr3c3\t\n
r1 = row 1
c1 = column 1
I also have this information and requirement:
c1 should display at column 1
c2 should display at column 20
c3 should display at column 25
So for each row, replace the tab with an appropriate number of spaces to
ensure that column 2 (no matter the length of column 1) will always start in
column 20. The same for column 3, but starting at column 25.
This is my poor man's formatting utility. I can change the input in anyway
I want (additional tabs or newline characters, strings and so on). I just
cannot line it up appropriately before my plugin gets it to display it on
the screen.
I was hoping I could do 1 substitute command that would do something like
this:
s/\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\n/\1\%20c\2\%25c\3\r/g
In other words, replace the tabs with a specified column position.
But looking at the help the \%##c is only used for matching, not the
replacement part (a simple test confirmed).
c1, c2, c3 data can all be different lengths for each row, so I can just
added a preset number of spaced.
Does anyone have any suggested approaches?
TIA,
Dave
Re: Substitute tabs for specific column locations
So for each row, replace the tab with an appropriate number of spaces to
ensure that column 2 (no matter the length of column 1) will always start in
column 20. The same for column 3, but starting at column 25.
This is my poor man's formatting utility. I can change the input in anyway
I want (additional tabs or newline characters, strings and so on). I just
cannot line it up appropriately before my plugin gets it to display it on
the screen.
I was hoping I could do 1 substitute command that would do something like
this:
s/\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\(.\{-}\)\t\n/\1\%20c\2\%25c\3\r/g
You have to tweak the spacing yourself, manually-ish. Vim7
provides a repeat() function that, in earlier versions, you'd
have to recreate yourself. Thus, you can do something like this
one-liner (broken into several lines to make the parts more obvious)
:%s/^\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)\t\([^\t]*\)/\=
matchstr(submatch(1).repeat(' ', 20), '^.\{20}').
matchstr(submatch(2).repeat(' ', 25), '^.\{25}').
submatch(3)
It builds the expressions, padding the submatch(m) to N places,
which you repeat, add to your original portion, and then lop off
anything that extends beyond those N places.
There are also some column-alignment plugins/scripts if you dig
around on the vim site. Or perhaps Dr. Chip's sight. I usually
just use the above on the rare occasion I need to do as much, on
the grounds that I don't remember where to look, don't always
have access to a network connection to download plugins.
Besides, I tend to fly with a pretty stock vim with no add-ins.
But other do sing the praises of the align.vim script. :)
HTH,
-tim
