Question

Here’s what I mean –

Say I have these throughout my file

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table1").each_hash do ..
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table2").each_hash do ..
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table3").each_hash do ..

client.query("select * from table1").each_hash do ..
client.query("select * from table2").each_hash do ..
client.query("select * from table3").each_hash do ..

I want to replace only the ActiveRecord’s each_hash calls with each(:as => :hash), so I’d get:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table1").each(:as => :hash) do ..
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table2").each(:as => :hash) do ..
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select * from table3").each(:as => :hash) do ..

And leave the client.query rows unaffected.

I know I can use macros, but how do I do this with vim’s search/replace? I thought about using this:

%s/\.execute(.*).each_hash/ ...something... /g

The question is, how do I preserve the actual query through the search and replace (what comes where …something… is)?

Answer 1

Perfect use case for the \zs atom in vim’s regex. This tells vim to ignore anything before (and including) \zs when doing a replacement.

:%s/\.execute(.\{-})\.each\zs_hash/(:as => :hash)/

A better explaination of \zs can be found at :help /\zs.