Is there a way to split a line automatically like awk would?
Given "A quick brown fox jumped over ",
awk '{print $3}' ... ==> brown
Well, Vim supports passing a range of lines through awk, so
assuming you have awk available, you can just do
:%!awk '{print $3}'
Fairly straight-forward and readable, though as mentioned,
not entirely a "vim" solution, as it uses awk to do the
heavy lifting.
or like in perl
split(':',$line)...
Vim also has (or at least *can* have, if built that way) a
built-in perl interpreter. Not being a perl wonk, I'm
afraid I don't know the ins and outs of using perl within
vim. The python version would look something like
:python current.line=current.line.split[2]
(my version here doesn't have either perl or python built in)
I'd like to do within vim something like
:s/{some notation}/\3
without having to define the pattern
Others on the list have given the canonical, though rather
opaque/verbose vim solution(s) which unfortunately do
require the expression to be written out.
Theoretically, one could wrap the logic in a function that
'exec'ed a ":s" statement that it built on the fly,
something like this purely untested
function foo(delim, pos) range
exec
a:firstline.','.a.lastline.'s/\%([^'.a:delim.']*'.a:delim.'\)\{'.(a:pos-1).'}\([^'.a:delim.']*\).*'/\1'
endfunc
Various levels of escaping may need to be tweaked, and I'm
not sure I've got the range syntax correctly. However, this
theoretical function would then be called with
:%call foo(' ', 3)
or
:'<,'>call foo(':', 2)
It doesn't gracefully handle certain delimiters such as
forward and backward slashes, right square brackets,
multi-character delimiters, etc.
Just a few more ideas to add to your stockpile. Hope they help,
-tim
