OK, so I know this must be an easy sed/awk thing or something that is done every day;

what I find I am doing is selecting code from web pages and centre click inserting them into vi and what happens is that each line gets incrementally indented thus ruining the formatting of the conf file or whatever.

What I have done is a repeated dw on each line from back to front and all comes into line...

What is the best way to do this? Ie remove the leading tabs or clearspace that comes over when cutting and pasting text from html to plain text.

help appreciated

TIA

Will

You could try doing one of 2 things:


If you'r using vim and not vi, there's an option:

:set paste

which will prevent this indentation. If that doesn't help, you could open the page with a browser such as link and then save the formatted text as a file and extract the text from there.

God I love answers like that ! Thank you LinuxGeek :set paste is exactly what I need.

Cheers,
Will

You're welcome