i have a html-file with footnotes converted to plain text and
like to replace the footnotes in the text with the
footnotetext many pages later, eg. the occurrence of [12] with
the later definition (many pages later) like [12] "bla bla
bla." Does anybody has an idea, how to achieve this?
Without deeper detail about your file, I'll take a shot. Some
assumptions include that a footnote is on one line, that a
footnote can be found with "^\[\d\+] as a regexp
My basic thought would be to do something like the following logic:
1) use a ":g" command to perform an action on each of my known
footnotes, as identified by some regexp
2) compose a ":s" command as a string that searches for
references to the given footnote
3) :exec the resulting string.
My first pass would look something like this 100% untested shot:
:g/^\[\d\+]/exec
'%s@'.
substitute(
escape(
getline('.'),
'@[\\.*&'
),
'\(\[\d\+]\).*',
'\1@&',
''
)
(broken into multiple lines to make it easier to parse, though it
should all be on one line). I'm sure I forgot some of the
characters that need to be escaped, and the resulting regexp
might not be quite what I expected it to be, but it should be
pretty close. You can proof it by changing the "exec" to "echo"
so it doesn't actually change anything.
You might want to specify ranges, if your footnotes (or rather
"endnotes") begin at line 3141 in your file, you might alter the
above to
:3141,$g/^\[\d\+]/exec
'1,3140s@'.
...
so that you're not changing the footnote itself (assuming they're
end-notes rather than foot-notes)
Another method might be to assume that footnotes are sequential
and do something like:
:let fn=1
:while search('^\['.fn.']', 'w') > 0 | let fn_text = getline('.')
| exec '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.fn.']@'.escape(fn_text, '@[\\.*&') | let fn+=1 |
endwhile
Neither is particularly pretty, elegant, robust, or
comprehensible (more like "reprehensible" :) but they're a first
pass at ideas on how I'd tackle it.
There are problems when an in-line footnote happens to have found
its way to the beginning of a line and thus get confused for
being the actual footnote contents, but otherwise, the above
should be enough to get you started.
-tim
