[CLUE-Tech] vim's join command on large documents answer

[Kevin Cullis]

David Anselmi wrote:
> 
> Kevin Cullis wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > :g/[.,a-z]$/j
> >
> > It sort of works every third try and I have to do it a number of times
> > to get a good finished product.  While it works, why the number of times
> > versus just once on the whole document?
> 
> Let me see if I understand what you want.  You paste text from a browser
> window into vim.  That gives you paragraphs made up of several lines.  Each
> line starts with several spaces and paragraphs are separated by a blank
> line.

Yep, you got it!

> 
> You want to end up with one long line where each paragraph was, with a blank
> line between paragraphs.  So you need something different than gq as we
> originally assumed.

Yep, but don't think that your other comments went unnoticed or not
considered even though they didn't solve my problem. It all relates to
cleaning up text and the various ways to do it and I learned a lot of
other ways of solving problems, such as the fmt command, that I could
use in the future.

> 
> As it happens, the last line of each paragraph ends with a space.  Otherwise
> the above command would join out the blank lines and you'd join all the
> paragraphs into one.  That being the case, here's a shorter version of what
> you have:
> 
> :g/[^ ]$/j
> 
> which means "lines that end with other than a space".

Yes it is shorter and the results are the same.

> 
> This needs to be run more than once because the global command goes to each
> matching line, does a join, then goes to the next matching line.  It doesn't
> go to a line and do joins until the line doesn't match.  Few of the Unix
> line mode tools (sed, awk, etc) will do what you want without a little
> programming.

This is what I was beginning to think was happening, but wasn't sure.

> 
> Here's something closer, I think:
> 
> :g /[^ ]$/ /[^ ]$/ j | /[^ ]$/ j
> 
> This says, on each line that ends with other than a space, do two joins -
> but only if the line ends with other than a space.  I'm a little fuzzy on
> why this works, it's getting late.  If anyone wants to explain, I'm all
> ears.

Me too.

> A perhaps better way is gq.  Just do the gggqG (or whatever like we said
> earlier) to run the gq command on each paragraph in the file.  The trick is
> that first you use :set tw=<large num> (where <large num> is a number larger
> than the character count of any paragraph).  Then you get your reformating
> but each paragraph is turned into one line.

The gggqG is new to me and I wasn't aware of it, so I'll have to add
that to my list of things to learn.

> 
> Finally, both of these leave the final (one-line) paragraphs indented as the
> original, but you already know how to fix that.

At least MY version to fix it.  I'm always looking out for other ways.

> 
> I hope all that helps (whew!)  If not, maybe you need to restate the problem
> more clearly.

Absolutely you helped.  While I like to find a solution to my problem, I
always like to learn how other people have found answers to their
problems.

Thanks for the help.

Kevin