vim 'n' lynx: command line option to search for string

Samsara · 08-23-2003, 07:50 PM

Hi All!

I've looked at man and info pages, but can't figure out how to pass an argument to lynx and vim on the command line that will highlight all occurences of a given string. I'm thinking something like

vim --search-string=highlightme $foo.txt
lynx --search-string=highlightme $foo.html

Can this be done? Any alternatives?

Thanks,

Samsara

martinman · 08-23-2003, 08:24 PM

in vim you can search by typing "/ searchterm"

Samsara · 08-23-2003, 08:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by martinman
in vim you can search by typing "/ searchterm"

Yeah, sorry I should have mentioned that. I want to do it from the command line, because I have a lot of files to go through and a fetish for automating things

Cheers,

Samsara

seabass55 · 08-23-2003, 09:31 PM

have you tried grep?

Samsara · 08-24-2003, 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by seabass55
have you tried grep?

Oh, I use grep lots, but it's not the same: for instance, in grep you can't tell whether something is a tab or a space, if you see what I mean... grep is really good for predictable situations, e.g. where you know exactly how many context lines you will need, but you won't always have that prior information.

Thanks anyway,

Samsara

jphase · 01-02-2013, 06:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samsara

Oh, I use grep lots, but it's not the same: for instance, in grep you can't tell whether something is a tab or a space, if you see what I mean... grep is really good for predictable situations, e.g. where you know exactly how many context lines you will need, but you won't always have that prior information.

Thanks anyway,

Samsara

Hey, this might be old or what-not, but I figured I would reply anyhow for Googlers.

Yes, you can do this. Start by outputting the source code with lynx and then we can strip the characters from there with sed and a simple regex. For example, to get your ip address from http://ipaddress.com:

Code:

lynx http://ipaddress.com -source | grep 'My IP Address' | tail -n1 | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'

output source code from ipaddress.com | search for 'My IP Address' | print out last line | strip <html> tags

Further stripping of text can happen afterwards. Just check for "sed find and replace" in Google and pipe the output to the command. If you need something more complex after that, I would actually recommend using a scripting language.

TobiSGD · 01-02-2013, 06:36 PM

Just for completeness, with Vim you can use the -c option to give Vim commands to execute after opening a file, this works also with searches.