Question

I have a bunch of lines that I’d like to split into two columns, and get the data from each column. The data looks something like this:

current_well.well_number current_well.well_name current_well.well_type_code well_location.section well_location.range 

Essentially what I’d like to do is split the line based off of the period, turn the data into two columns, and then grab the data for each column. I know this can be done in Excel, but I’m really interested in VIs solution for this problem. I know that

%s/\./ 

will format the string with empty spaces. But once I have the data looking like:

current_well    well_number current_well    well_name current_well    well_type_code well_location   section well_location   range 

How do I grab all the values for each column so I can paste it into another application?

Answer 1

I’ve run into this problem a number of times. Changing the dots to tabs will line them up mostly nice, but not really. It’s true that all the columns will start on a tabstop, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll be on the same tabstop. For instance, if this was your original text:

lt1tab.value1 gt1tabstop.value2 

and you do:

%s/\./\t/g 

and assuming a tabstop is 8 spaces, you’ll get:

lt1tab  value1 gt1tabstop    value2 

What you might want to do instead is remove everything but the last column (or whichever column you want). For instance:

%s/^.*\.// 

will leave you with:

value1 value2 

Which you can easily copy and paste.

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If you don’t have to use Vim, you can use unix’s cut to do what you want:

cut -f2 -d. input_file > output_file