Vim: study on transposing lists of names from horizontal to vertical

Primary purpose of the study.

  • Initial status: series of inline names, separated by a semicolon followed by a space.
  • Objective: Transpose all names into one column by removing both semicolons and spaces.
  • Purpose: Creating list for mail-merging with e-mail client (Thunderbird).
  • Tools: Vim and built-in RegEx function.
  • Example:

From: 

One@mail; Two@mail; Three@mail; ...

To: 

One@mail
Two@mail
Three@mail
...

Secondary goal

To test the integration between Markdown and css tags.

This objective was accomplished in the Example above by inserting the following code:

<p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">
Da:
</p>

<pre>
One@mail; Two@mail; Three@mail; ...
</pre>

<p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">
A:
</p>

<pre>
One@mail
Two@mail
Three@mail
...
</pre>

Vim: regular expression for the primary target

To obtain the transposition from horizontal to vertical, the object of the primary target, the following formula is used:

:%s/; /\r/g

Analysis of the formula:

  • :%s: activation of substitution mode throughout the document
  • /; /: search for the string to replace, note the space after the semicolon that corresponds to the original structure of the list.
  • \r/: replace the string found by the previous command with a carriage return.
  • g: global option, that is, application of the result to all instances found.

And now: the reverse procedure.

At this point I also try the reverse procedure: from the vertical list to the horizontal list delimited by semicolon followed by a blank space.

Basically from

One@mail
Two@mail
Three@mail
...

to

One@mail; Two@mail; Three@mail; ...

The same formula above can be used with inverted factors:

%s/\n/; /g

where with \n I select the carriage returns and with /; /g I replace them with a semicolon and a space.

Thank you for your attention.

Originally published at https://francopasut.netlify.app

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