I needed to insert a space between months and years in text in a document while using Vim, a version of the Vi editor for Windows systems. The text was as shown below:
December1999 Edition
November1999 Edition
October1999 Edition
...
March1996 Edition
February1996 Edition
January1996 Edition
:.,$ s/199\(\d) Edition/ 199\1/ to perform the substitution.
To search from the line I was on to the end of the document I can use
.,$. With the substitute s command, you can search
and replace text with commands of
the form s/old text/new text. You can use the i
option, if you don't want the case of letters to be considered, i.e. if you
wish "A" and "a" to be treated the same, then you can use s/old text/new
text/i. You can use the g option, if you wish to replace
all occurrences of old text on the line, for cases where the
text may occur multiple times on the same line, e.g. s/old text/new
text/g. You can use whatever delimiter you wish to separate the
parts of the command, e.g. you can use s:old text:new text:.
The \d in the command indicates that I am only looking for
digits, i.e. 0 to 9. By enclosing the \d in parentheses, i.e.
by using (\d), I can have the editor "remember" whatever it
found between the parentheses. Then I can have it insert what it has
remembered in the replacement text by using \1. If I had
used multiple parentheses at various parts in the search text, then the
second string I wanted remembered would be indicated with a \2.
In this case the last digit of the year was all I wanted the editor to
remember and insert appropriately in the substitutiong text.
If you wish to search an entire document, you can use 1,$
to represent the first line of the file through the last line, or you
can just use % to represent the entire file.
:% s/199\(\d) Edition/ 199\1/References:
