On 17/11/12 04:01, Salman Halim wrote:
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 7:35 PM, Ant <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello all,
I am starting to see the power of VIM! But I am still so new at it
all so would like some help.
I am trying to do something, here is an example
==============================
Extremely large document.txt
hello little cat.
how are you?
I hope you
are
well today.
:)
Hello world!
==============================
how would you delete every line in between "how are you?" and ":)"??
is there an easy way to do it for several hundred text documents? An
example of my use is deleting text between two unique numbers that
occur on hundreds of text documents, and have different content in
each. Actually I wouldnt mind being able to get all that content out
onto another text file.
THANKS!!
The deletion command:
:/^how are you?$/+1,/^:)$/-1d
This defines a range starting with the line immediately after the line
matching "^how are you?$" (that's the +1) and just before the line
matching "^:)$" (the -1 bit) and deletes it using the "d" command. If
you wanted to delete the two matching lines, also, then you would leave
out the offsets.
Bear in mind that this works just like the standard search command (/)
and works on the next matching range after the cursor; if you have
multiple matches in one file, stick a g before the whole thing (:g/^how...).
While Vim is an editor and not meant to handle multiple files in this
fashion, in my opinion, you could probably use :bufdo, :argdo, :windo or
:tabdo (most likely argdo) to make it happen across a number of files.
I wonder if sed might be better for this task; the syntax for the
command would probably be similar.
Hope this helps,
Salman
The above implements a linewise deletion. For characterwise, you can use
:%s/how are you?\zs\_.*\ze:-)//e
Notes:
- If there are several matching pairs, this subsitute will remove from
the first "how are you" to the last ":-)".
- The above is for "exclusive" deletion (keeping the bounding strings).
For "inclusive", remove the \zs and \ze markers
- The /e flag at the end avoids an error if there is no match.
Best regards,
Tony.
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