Join lines between a certain text pattern in Vim

vim

I have a text file which looks like this:

A.
text
text
text


A.
more text

more text

A.
more text

I want to join all lines between the "markers" A. so that it looks like:

A.texttexttext
A.more textmore text
A.more text

How can I do this in Vim?

Best Answer

:%s/\n\(\(A\.$\)\@!.*\)/\1/

Substitute a pattern matching:

newline,
a group containing of
1. not the string A. directly followed by end-of-line, then
2. any character until end of line

with:

everything matched except the starting newline (i.e. the group above),

and do this globally.

Related Solutions

Join lines inside paragraphs in vim

I think this does what you want: make sure there is an empty line at the end of the file, then join every paragraph (terminated by an empty line).

G:a

.
:g/^./ .,/^$/-1 join

Explanation: first go to the end of the file and append an extra empty line with :a (maybe there's a more elegant way to do that; interactively, you can replace the first three lines with o<ESC>). Then, for every non-blank line that hasn't been considered yet (:g/^./), apply the join command to the range starting at the selected line (.) and ending one line before the next empty line (/^$/-1).

Optionally, :g/^$/d if you don't want any blank line to remain (then you can take off the -1).

How to join multiples lines based on a pattern

Instead of deleting the {1, just do

:%sort rn /\d\d\d}/

That will do a numerical sort, but on each line it will only look at three digits followed by a }.

Also, to join the lines afterwards, I would do

:g/{\d\d\d}/j!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Join lines inside paragraphs in vim

How to join multiples lines based on a pattern

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