deleting a column in vi 3

[praywin]

Hi,
I want to delete a column from a file while inside a vi session. I know the awk solution I want to know if it is possible using vi.
Cheers,
Pravin.

 

[jad]

umm ... i guess you could possibly use a global substitute ... but if you can it'd probably be better and easier to use awk or sed.

can you give an example of the before and after?

 

[SamBones]

If you know how to do it in awk, why would you even need to do it in vi?

 

[praywin]

Well its more like I am in the middle of a session in vi . I don't want to save the file, go to the shell, run awk and come back to vi for more editing.

Lets say I am editing a file like this

1 Pravin - He loves ice creams
2 Rahul - He too loves ice creams

Now I open it in vi and change it to

1 Pravin - He loves girls
2 Rahul - He just loves ice creams

Now I realise I want to remove the line numbers so that it becomes

Pravin - He loves girls
Rahul - He just loves ice creams

It would be nice if I could do it without exiting vi .. for I may change my mind again ;-)

Cheers,
Pravin.

 

[JasonDeckard]

For the example you gave, this will work:

:s/[1-9] /

If you can give a more specific example, I can give a more specific solution

 

[praywin]

Well .. it works for this example but I want a more generic solution where I can remove a column of data from a file I am editing in vi. Lets say no search pattern works. All you have is space " " separated data

adfkj asdflkj wqeroiu adfk
adsk qwep dai qwer oupu
adsfu qwer cou wer cou

Now I want to remvoe the second column, Can I do it?

Cheers,
Pravin.

 

[jad]

well you'd want to do it globally ...
:g/^[0-9][0-9]* /s///

 

[Ygor]

:%s/ [^\ ]* / /

 

[praywin]

:%s/ [^\ ]* / /

Well again this works only for the example I gave. It won't work for the third or fourth column.

However this is very valuable starging point

:%s/ [^\ ]* / /

The input can be represented as

[^\ ]*[ [^\ ]* ]* (bad regexp I guess)

So we somehow have to pick the n'th [ [^\ ]* ] pattern and remove it.

Thanks for your help
Cheers,
Pravin.

 

[Ygor]

Delete 4th column....

:w
then
:%!cut -d' ' -f1,2,3,5- %

 

[praywin]

Thanks. I guess this should solve the basic problem of not having to exit vi.
Cheers,
Pravin.