How to extract text matching a regex using Vim?
This will replace each line with a tab-delimited list of coordinates per line:
:%s/.* title="(\(\d\+\),\(\d\+\))".*/\1\t\2
This task can be achieved with a much simpler solution and with few keystrokes using normal command:
:%normal df(f)D
This means:
%
- Run normal command on all file lines;normal
- run the following commands in normal mode;df(
- delete everything until you find a parenthesis (parenthesis included);f)
- move the cursor to );D
- delete everything until the end of the line.
You can also set a range, for example, run this from line 5 to 10:
:5,10normal df(f)D
If you want an ad hoc solution for this one-off case, it might be quicker simply to select a visual block using CTRL-v. This will let you select an arbitrary column of text (in your case, the column containing title="(X,Y)"
), which can then be copied as usual using y
.