Question

does anyone know if it is possible to concatenate matches resulting from a search into a single register? E.g, I have a file with following contents:

aaa :xxx 123 bb :y 8 ccccc :zzzzz 1923 

Now what I want is to copy column starting with ‘:’ somewhere else. Unfortunatelly I can’t use visual block mode, because the first column hasn’t fixed width. I thought that I could search for the second column (:\w+) and store the maches into a register.

Answer 1

Another way:

:g/:/norm f:'Aye 

Per :h quote_alpha, if you use an uppercase register name, it appends rather than replaces the contents of the register. If you run this and check the contents of register 'a, you’ll see

:xxx:y:zzzzz 

(Possibly with linebreaks, depending on how you have cpoptions set.)