Question

I have a file with a lot of data in it, one being a last-modified=”1231231231″

where 1231231231 is epoch time in milliseconds

<Translation 
  author_id="25" 
  id="02f18edd-ef7a-48e2-b614-b5888936017e"
  language="de_DE" 
  last_modified="1325669156960" 
  phase="1" 
  target="[ phase=&quot;1&quot; language=&quot;de_DE&quot; ]"
  translation_text="Funktionen"/>

Note the: last_modified=”1325669156960″

I can run this:

:%s/\([0-9]\{10\}\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1/g  

to find all these occurrences and replace them with a “seconds” string:

last_modified=”1325669156″

I can then pattern match on those 10 digits, and what I’d like to do is pipe them to the unix data -d command to return a formatted data stamp:

:%s/[0-9]\{10\}/&/g 

In this example, instead of replacing with the same value as I found (I.e, the &),

I’d like to somehow pipe that value to what would be essentially:

date -d &

and return that as a formatted time stamp in the

last_modified="Wed Jan  4 07:13:32 MST 2012"

Any ideas on how to do this? I have to do this about every other week on various files.

Answer 1

You can use strftime() in vim. Find one proper format string to meet your needs.
I’m using %c here:

:%s/last_modified="\zs\(\d\{10}\)\d\{3}/\=strftime('%c', str2nr(submatch(1)))/g

result:

<Translation 
  author_id="25" 
  id="02f18edd-ef7a-48e2-b614-b5888936017e"
  language="de_DE" 
  last_modified="2012-1-4 17:25:56" 
  phase="1" 
  target="[ phase=&quot;1&quot; language=&quot;de_DE&quot; ]"
  translation_text="Funktionen"/>