A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
> Aaron wrote:
>> A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
>> > Aaron wrote:
>> >> Please, oh Vim gurus, explain this binary/noeol situation. It
>> >> seems to me that if I open a text file in e.g. metapad or Edit
>> >> Plus or any of these other very simple Windows-based text
>> >> editors, I am able to delete the "final line break," which
>> >> appears on screen as though there is a zero-length line right
>> >> after the last line of text. I press backspace on that empty line
>> >> and it is gone; so is the EOL.
>> >>
>> >> In order to achieve this in Vim, I must perform strange
>> >> acrobatics including turning on "binary," which clobbers my
>> >> textwidth, wrapmargin, expandtab, and modeline options, and
>> >> forces unix-like line separators.
>> >>
>> >> My only guess is that Vim follows certain established rules for
>> >> the formatting of proper text files, but I have run across
>> >> situations where I need to edit text files (AS text files) that
>> >> have no final EOL, and it pains me that Vim makes this harder
>> >> than such functionally limited editors as Edit Plus.
>> >>
>> >> Is there some Better Way?
>> >>
>> >
>> > In text, each line is supposed to end in an end-of-line. This
>> > avoids, for instance, that concatenating two text files would make
>> > the last line of the one run into the first line of the other.
>> > Whenever Vim writes a text file, it makes sure that the last
>> > character or character pair is the end-of-line marker
>> > corresponding to the file's 'filetype'. This is intentional.
>> >
>> > In binary files (such as programs), there are no true "lines" to
>> > speak of, and the length of the file must be preserved. Therefore
>> > Vim checks at load whether the file ends in and end-of-line, saves
>> > it in the boolean buffer-local option 'eol', and uses that when
>> > writing the file. Alternately, you may filter binary files
>> > through the xxd utility (distributed with Vim), and edit them in
>> > hex.
>> >
>> > If other editors are broken in the sense that they forget to write
>> > the last line's end-of-line marker, that's no fault of Vim's. And
>> > they _are_ broken: I don't remember off the top of my head where
>> > the corresponding regulation is to be found, but the matter has
>> > been discussed time and time again in these mailing lists; I guess
>> > searching the list archive might give you something to chew on.
>> >
>> >
>> > Best regards,
>> > Tony.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> Thanks Tony, that's along the lines of what I expected to hear back
>> from everyone. Perhaps my solution is to edit the file normally and
>> then set binary just before writing it to preserve its broken state.
>
> yes, that should work if you're dead set on writing a file without a
> final EOL. You might even automate it further by defining
> autocommands: let's say that particular filetype is identified by
> extension .xyz -- then you can define
>
> :autocmd BufWritePre *.xyz setlocal binary
> :autocmd BufWritePost *.xyz setlocal nobinary
>
>>
>> If anyone is curious, the reason this came up is because ColdFusion
>> custom tags will print that trailing newline as a space even when you
>> tell it to suppress white space. The only way to avoid it is to save
>> the custom tag file without the final newline (as a broken file).
>>
>> In this case, two wrongs do equal a right...
>>
>> Sorry for the long lines and top-posting in my earlier
>> correspondence!
>>
>
> No problem.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Tony.
You beat me to it, I was halfway through reading the autocommands help
entry when this came through. Thanks, Yakov, for suggesting this.
Here's a thought, though. There is nothing in the file type or filename
that will indicate that it is a custom tag, but the file will *always*
live in /some/path/custom_tags/myfile.cfm. That's where the CF server
will look for custom tags so they have to be there by design.
So perhaps I can do something like:
au BufWritePre *.cfm call MaybeSetBinary()
au BufWritePost *.cfm call MaybeUnsetBinary()
fun! MaybeSetBinary()
if match(expand('%'),'custom_tags') > -1
setlocal binary
endif
endfun
fun! MaybeUnsetBinary()
if match(expand('%'),'custom_tags') > -1
setlocal nobinary
endif
endfun
I'll do some experimentation. Thanks again Yakov and Tony.
--
Aaron
"The Dude abides."
