Sometimes we know what we want to do with text even if we don’t know what the text is.
Regular expressions are an important feature of many tools (programing languages, command line tools, etc.), but they play an especially important role in Vim. Text in Vim is first class, so all of Vim’s features should ultimately serve the purpose of editing text. Here we will explore some examples where regular expressions serve Vim well in this effort.
Sorting
Vim’s built in sort function is a very powerful tool to sort lines. Let’s say we have a file with the following grocery list.
Blueberries-Frozen (Trader Joes)
Charcoal (Trader Joes)
Cookies-Bakery (Whole Foods)
Ice (Trader Joes)
Lettuce-Produce (Whole Foods)
Peaches-Produce (Trader Joes)
Salmon-Fish (Fresh Market)
Strawberries-Frozen (Whole Foods)
Trout-Fish (Fresh Market)
Waffles-Frozen (Whole Foods)
The list features items from multiple sections at different grocery stores. We want to optimize our time shopping, since we have important Vim related research to take care of, so we need to sort our list beforehand. Using the :sort command alone would sort the entries alphabetically by item name. This isn’t useful as no grocery store is laid out in a such a fashion. However using the r option we can feed sort a regular expression which identifies which section of the line to sort on.
First we sort the list based on category with the following command
:sort /-\w*/ r
Charcoal (Trader Joes)
Ice (Trader Joes)
Cookies-Bakery(Whole Foods)
Salmon-Fish (Fresh Market)
Trout-Fish (Fresh Market)
Blueberries-Frozen (Trader Joes)
Strawberries-Frozen (Whole Foods)
Waffles-Frozen (Whole Foods)
Peaches-Produce (Trader Joes)
Lettuce-Produce (Whole Foods)
Here we match on the on the word following a hyphen and our list is sorted! But this list is still of little use since the items are distributed across three grocery stores. The following command can help us out.
:sort /(.*)/ r
Salmon-Fish (Fresh Market)
Trout-Fish (Fresh Market)
Ice (Trader Joes)
Charcoal (Trader Joes)
Blueberries-Frozen (Trader Joes)
Peaches-Produce (Trader Joes)
Cookies-Bakery (Whole Foods)
Strawberries-Frozen (Whole Foods)
Waffles-Frozen (Whole Foods)
Lettuce-Produce (Whole Foods)
In a similar stroke, we match on the text in parenthesis and now the list is sorted first by grocery store and second by section!
Repeated words
When writing prose, repeated words are almost always a typo (save the occasional that that). Below I have taken us back to the early nineteenth century where an eager Jane Austen has just written the first line of Pride and Prejudice and has erroneously repeated two words.
It is a truth truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Now after completing this timeless sentence, Ms. Austen starts a search in Vim and with the following regular expression matches the repeated words. dockhad
\<\(\w\+\) \1\>
Here she uses a capture group and a backreference to identify repeated words and quickly with a substitution…
%s/\<\(\w\+\) \1\>/\1/g
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
she can correct her mistake.
It is also possible to use Vim’s unique lookahead syntax (@=) to find words that appear within a given distance of another, or in this case of themselves. Here is an example in the opening lines of All the Pretty Horses.
\<\(\w\+\)\>\(.\{0,50}\<\1\>\)\@=
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass and twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
Here our expression starts the same with a capture group containing a word, but instead of following with a direct reference to our first capture group, we embed our reference within a second capture group along with an arbitrarily quantified set of any character. Here we use fifty. In Vim we include @= at the end of a capture group to signify a lookahead.
Unlike the first case this by no means indicates a typo and as in the sentence above, it is often to great affect.
As an aside, ‘and’ and ’the’ are also found by this pattern in the above example. I think any reasonable implimentation of this feature would exclude articles and the like.
Vim Rocks
In closing, Vim rocks. And regular expressions rock. So they go great together.