🚀 go-pugleaf

bvaughan@sheps.Princeton.EDU (Barbara Vaughan) writes:
|> Back in the days when I mostly worked with MSDOS and had a good editor
|> that handled rectangular blocks easily, I used to use it to prepare data
|> so I COULD read it into a spreadsheet or word processor.  For instance, if
|> I have a file  of formatted data:
|> 
|> 123456789
|> 987654321
|> 
|> I can use my editor to insert a column of blanks in front of each field so
|> it can be read into a spreadsheet program:
|> 
|> 12 34 56 78 9
|> 98 76 54 32 1

You could use :%s\(..\)\(..\)\(..\)\(..\)\(.\)/\1 \2 \3 \4 \5/
to do that.

|> Or if I have some ugly SPSS CROSSTAB output, where cells are separated by
|> dashes, plus signs and vertical bars:
|> 
|>    1 | 23 |
|> -----+----+
|>      |    |
|>    3 | 45 +
|> -----+----+
|> 
|> I can get rid of those  vertical bar columns in a jiffy with a good
|> editor, so that I can do the rest of the job of making a nice document in
|> WordPerfect. 

You could use :%s/|//g  or  :%s/[|+-]//g  to do that.

|> I also found this feature useful when writing programs.  Let's say I have
|> a section of code I decide to make conditional, so I want to indent it to
|> make an "if.. then.." block.  I just insert a column of blanks in front of
|> that section of code.

You could use :'a,'bs/^/  / to shift a block to the right.

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