Tim,
Many thanks!
There's an answer on the Stack Exchange site. Does that method work also?
Cheers.
On Saturday, July 25, 2020 at 6:42:37 PM UTC-5, Tim Chase wrote:
>
> On 2020-07-25 15:59, Adrian Keister wrote:
> > Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their
> > country.
> >
> > In this test, I want to find all occurrences where the word 'aid'
> > is within ten words of the word 'country'. How can I do that in Vim?
>
> It's way ugly and requires using the old regex engine[1] (asserted by
> the "\%#=1" in the following pattern) to work, but this should do the
> trick and be fairly DRY (only requires putting in each term once):
>
> \%#=1\%(\S\+\_s\+\)\{,9}\<aid\>\&\%(\S\+\_s\+\)\{,9}\<country\>
>
> I might have a fenceposting issue where "9" should be "8" or "10",
> but it should give you the foundation to mess around. Also, I added
> the "\<" and "\>" to anchor the words so you don't find things like
> "I said my uncle is a country boy" (finding the "aid" in "said").
> Again, season to taste for your own needs.
>
> The cursor lands a little weirdly (especially noticable if you have
> syntax highlighting turned on) because it starts from the point at
> which "within the next N words you'll find "aid" and within the next N
> words you'll also find "country".
>
> Alternatively, if you don't mind typing your literals more than once,
> you can do
>
>
> /\<aid\>\%(\_s\+\S\+\)\{,10}\_s\+\<country\>\|\<country\>\%(\_s\+\S\+\)\{,10}\_s\+\<aid\>
>
>
>
> which will highlight a little more neatly at the cost of extra typing.
> However, it also doesn't scale as well if you have more than 2 words
> because you need to provide every possible ordering. The method at
> the top scales easily for however many words you want within an
> N-word range.
>
> Hopefully one or the other works well for you.
>
> -tim
>
>
> [1] For the record, the new regex engine gives me an
>
> E363: pattern uses more memory than 'maxmempattern'
>
> where the old engine works fine.
>
>
>
>
>
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