Vim: surround a list of sentences with HTML tags

If you have a list of words or sentences in Vim and you need to add a couple of tags around each of them you cannot siply use the V (upper v) command to select all of them before using vim.surround because in this case you get only one couple of tags for all the list.

You must use the VISUAL BLOCK command before the selection of all the content.

Let’s go to see it step by step.

You have a list with tree sentences:

This is a sentence.
This is another sentence.
And this is a third sentence.

If you simply wrap all these sentences in visual mode and activate vim.surround with St, you’ll get the following wrong result:

<p>
This is a sentence.
This is another sentence.
And this is a third sentence.
</p>

That’s not your proposal because you need to add a couple of tags around each one sentence not a single couple of tags for all sentences together.

Then you must use another strategy as like the following one:

  1. Ctrl-v (or Ctr-q in Windows) to activate the visual selection,
  2. 2j to select all the rows,
  3. $ to select all the sentences till the end,
  4. St to surround all sentences with a tag,
  5. <p> (or any other tag) to specify the desired tag.

At the end you’ll get:

<p>This is a sentence.</p>
<p>This is another sentence.</p>
<p>And this is a third sentence.</p>

That’s the desired result.

Thank you for your attention.

(Originally published in my Tumblr account)

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