Question

In my opinion, Vimscript does not have a lot of features for manipulating strings.
I often use matchstr(), substitute(), and less often strpart().
Perhaps there is more than that.

For example, what is the best way to remove all text between line numbers in the following string a?

let a = "\%8l............\|\%11l..........\|\%17l.........\|\%20l...."  " etc.

I want to keep only the digits and put them in a list:

['8', '11', '17', '20']  " etc.

(Note that the text between line numbers can be different.)

Answer 1

You’re looking for split()

echo split(a, '[^0-9]\+') 

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EDIT:

Given the new constraint: only the numbers from \%d\+l, I’d do:

echo map(split(a, '|'), "matchstr(v:val, '^%\\zs\\d\\+\\zel')")

NB: your vim variable is incorrectly formatted, to use only one backslash, you’d need to write your string with single-quotes. With double-quotes, here you’d need two backslashes.
So, with

let b = '\%8l............\|\%11l..........\|\%17l.........\|\%20l....'

it becomes

echo map(split(b, '\\|'), "matchstr(v:val, '^\\\\%\\zs\\d\\+\\zel')")