Question

I can get the word under the cursor with or , and I can use that to open a file and add it to the arg list. For example, with the cursor over a java class name, at line 45:

:arge +45 mydirhere/<cword>.java

But I don’t know how to pass into the the tag mechanism, so it will return the file name (and line number), that can be passed to arge

So I guess my question is specifically: “how do you call the tag mechanism?” I’m expecting something like:

String getFileAndLineforTag(String tag)

Answer 1

You can use the taglist() function. From :help taglist() (in Vim 7.1):

taglist({expr})                         *taglist()*
        Returns a list of tags matching the regular expression {expr}.
        Each list item is a dictionary with at least the following
        entries:
            name        Name of the tag.
            filename    Name of the file where the tag is
                    defined.  It is either relative to the
                    current directory or a full path.
            cmd     Ex command used to locate the tag in
                    the file.
            kind        Type of the tag.  The value for this
                    entry depends on the language specific
                    kind values.  Only available when
                    using a tags file generated by
                    Exuberant ctags or hdrtag.
            static      A file specific tag.  Refer to
                    |static-tag| for more information.
        More entries may be present, depending on the content of the
        tags file: access, implementation, inherits and signature.
        Refer to the ctags documentation for information about these
        fields.  For C code the fields "struct", "class" and "enum"
        may appear, they give the name of the entity the tag is
        contained in.

        The ex-command 'cmd' can be either an ex search pattern, a
        line number or a line number followed by a byte number.

        If there are no matching tags, then an empty list is returned.

        To get an exact tag match, the anchors '^' and '$' should be
        used in {expr}.  Refer to |tag-regexp| for more information
        about the tag search regular expression pattern.

        Refer to |'tags'| for information about how the tags file is
        located by Vim. Refer to |tags-file-format| for the format of
        the tags file generated by the different ctags tools.

When you define a custom command you can specify -complete=tag or
-complete=tag_listfiles. If you need to do something more elaborate you can use -complete=custom,{func} or -complete=customlist,{func}. See :help :command-completion for more on this.