Question

Using VI replacing the first occurrence/instance is pretty simple.

    :%s/search/replace/args

but, here is my data set in a .csv format/file:

"192.168.2.1","www.google.com","2009/01/11_10:00"," What a great website"
"192.168.2.2/driving/is/fun","-","2009/03/22_00:00","Driving website"
"192.168.2.4/boating/is/crazy","-","2009/03/22_00:00","Boating Website"
"192.168.2.5","www.cars.com","2009/04/27_00:00","What a good car website"

so, you’ll notice in the first line, there are 4 columns, this is the ideal line for the .csv format.

However, in the second line, there are 4 columns, but the first column only accepts ip addresses and nothing more, so 192.168.2.2/driving/is/fun must be removed or seperated with a “,” .csv delimter.

In vi, I was able to use the following:

    :/^"\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\//s/\//","/

which does the following:

• /^”\d{,3}.\d{,3}.\d{,3}.\d{,3}/ – Sets an anchor to start the search at the first IP with a forward slash /. For example, line 2: “192.168.2.2/

• /s///”,”/ – replaces the / at the end of the IP address and substitutes it with a .csv delimiter “,”

This works great in VI/VIM, replaces exactly what I need one line at a time. However, the data set is much much larger and manually using the following vi search and replace is time consuming. I am looking to script it or find an alternative solution because VI/VIM will only do it one line at a time, the following :s/search/replace/g replaces every / on the line changing the date column in addition.

Obviously, I’ve tried the following:

Adding the % for the whole file inside of the start of the substitution like so:

    :/^"\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\//%s/\//","/

which highlights every entry I need to modify but errors out:

    E492: Not an editor command: /^"\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\//%s/\//

which is rather confusing.

I would ultimately like to use sed/perl to script the editing of the whole file in one shot.

so..

“192.168.2.2/ –> “192.168.2.2”,”

First occurrence on every line.

Any help will be greatly appreciated..

Thanks!

Answer 1

In ViM, try:

 :%s/^\("\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\.\d\{,3}\)\(\/[^"]\)/\1","\2

That is, instead of a search/substitute I use a global (% is shortcut for 1,$ i.e from first line to last line) substitution. I moved your search pattern into the substitution pattern and capture the ip address and the path in separate groups. Then replace them back, squeezing "," in between.