如何在 Vim 中用正则表达式匹配行尾而不是段落？

Question

I am trying to join all lines in a paragraph, but not join one paragraph with the next.

In my text file, the paragraph is not defined by blank lines in between them, but with a period at the end of the line. There could be white spaces after the period but it still defines the end of the paragraph.

So, I wanted to do a macro that jumps to the next end of line, not stopping on those lines that have a period at the end.

I used this regex:

[^\.\s][\s]*$

Meaning: find any character that is not a period nor a whitespace, optionally followed by whitespaces to the end of the line.

I would then apply the J command to join the matched line with the next one, and then repeat.

It works fine on RegexPal , but in Vim it stops at lines that have a period and two spaces.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Instead of using the regex in a macro in conjunction with the J command, how about using a regex substitution to remove linebreaks? This seems to work for me:

:%s/[^\.]\s*\zs$\n\(^\s*$\n\)*/ /

Explanation:

• [^\.]\s*\zs$\n -- lines not ending with a period; start the replacement before the linebreak.
• \(^\s*$\n\)* -- include any further lines containing only whitespace

This regex is then replaced with a space.

Answer 2

If the cursor is located at the first line of a paragraph, one can join its lines with

:,/\.\s*$/j

To do the same for all paragraphs in a buffer, use the command

:g/^/,/\.\s*$/j

Answer 3

This should get you part way there: use shime 's regexp ( \.\s*$ ) to identify lines you want to join, then use :v//j! to join each such line to the next line.

Then repeat the :v//j! command until done. (Define a macro to do it: :map v:v//j!<cr> then just hit v repeatedly.)

A better solution, if you're on a *NIX-like machine is:

awk '/\.\s*$/ { printf("%s\n", $0);} { printf("%s", $0); } END { printf("\n"); }' <your_file >your_other_file