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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T23:33:03+00:00

Assuming the following text file, which is actually a data dump of funds and

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Assuming the following text file, which is actually a data dump of funds and price statistics:

PBCPDF
05/01/2006
 0.0000
 0.0000
PBCPDF
 0.0000
06/01/2006
 0.0000
 0.0000
PBCPDF
 0.0082
[… lines repeat …]

What I wanted to achieve is to delete all instances of PBCPDF except for the first one, which I could write the substitution command as :.+1,$s/PBCPDF\n//g.

However, since I wanted to program a macro to process multiple fund names, I need a means to use some sort of pattern that would retrieve the current line as the search pattern without me doing it by hand.

Is there a way to do that?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you’re doing this in a macro (using the q command) it’s smart enough to catch when you do some of the more esoteric keystroke commands – the one I’m specifically thinking about is CTRL-R, CTRL-W, which will insert the word under the cursor into the command line. So, for example, if you did 

    ESC
qw
/[CTRL-R, CTRL-W] (you should see the word under the cursor enter the command line)
[enter]
q

    then you just created a macro that searches for the next word in the buffer that’s the same as this one, get it? It will dynamically yank the word under the cursor into the command as part of the macro. There might be something like CTRL-W in the command above that does this for the whole line, but I don’t know it offhand.

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