The "Chapter*"-thingy was only meant as an example. The task I want to
do is: repeat overwriting (or may be inserting) charcters with a
previously given character starting from the current cursor position
until a perviously given number of the end-column is reached.
This sounds an awful lot like the description of a "padleft" or
"padright" function:
function! PadRight(s, c, len)
let l:s = a:s
while strlen(l:s) < a:len
let l:s = l:s . a:c
" for a PadLeft function, just use
" let l:s = a:c . l:s
" instead
endwhile
return l:s
endfunc
which can then be used with
:%s/.*/\=PadRight(submatch(0), '.', 70)
Or you can even do crazy stuff like
:%s/^\([^:]*\):\s*/\=PadRight(submatch(1), '.', 50)
which will transform text like
Chapter 9: page 20
Chapter 10: page 22
into
Chapter 9.........................................page 20
Chapter 10........................................page 22
(which will put the "page XX" starting at area^Wcharacter 51)
This seems to give you the parameterizability (is that a word?)
that you mentioned...wanting to change the character and the
count fairly easily.
-tim
