[SOLVED] vim: question about regular expressions

JosephS · 09-22-2011, 12:18 AM

I've been searching for information about regex and vim. I'm trying to do a couple of things: remove extra spaces between words, but not the spaces that I use for indenting at the front of a line; removing spaces in front of punctuation. I would appreciate if someone has info on this and a good tutorial for learning regex and vim.

Thanks

chrism01 · 09-22-2011, 12:24 AM

You could start here http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_10.html#10.2, but the entire vim docs are usually avail from within vim eg ':help' and in /usr/share/doc (or similar depending on distro).
See also this dedicated site http://vimregex.com/

markush · 09-22-2011, 02:03 AM

Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by JosephS

...I'm trying to do a couple of things: remove extra spaces between words, but not the spaces that I use for indenting at the front of a line

Code:

:%s\(\w\+\)\s\+/\1 /g

will substitute all multiple whitespace with one Spacecharacter except at the beginning of a line.

Quote:

removing spaces in front of punctuation

Code:

:%s/\s\+\([.,;!]\)/\1/

will remove all space in front of punctuation.

Hope that helps.

Markus

JosephS · 09-22-2011, 05:18 PM

Thanks for the help. The code helped. I will also look at the tutorials.