Question

I am using VIM 7.1.314 and would like to yank the names (chris, robert, ben) in the code shown below as fast as possible – how would I achieve this? Note the names are always aligned (regardless of users number).

user 1: chris (05/04/1984)
user 2: robert (11/12/1991)
user 3: ben (5/25/1993)

Also note, I’m looking for a solution where there is hundreds of names so scalability is important.

Answer 1

An easy way to do this is to shell out to an external program to help. For example:

:%!awk '{ print $3 }'

That will replace your entire edit buffer with the results of running that awk command on the contents of the current buffer. You can then copy the result to another file or whatever, and u easily gets your original buffer back to its previous state.