Running AWK in Vim's search

Question

How can you run AWK in Vim's selection of the search?

My pseudo-code

%s/!awk '{ print $2 }'//d

I am trying to delete the given column in the file.

Answer 1

if you want to delete something, use :%s/pattern//

pattern can't be a command, it's mostly a regular expression. expressing 2nd field in regular expression is not very easy

if you want to delete 2nd field, you can filter the text through cut utility

:%! cut -d ' ' -f 2 --complement

Answer 2

you could press "0", then press "w" to go to your 2nd column, and do "cw".

Answer 3

In command mode, press Ctrl-v to go into visual mode, then you can block-select the column using cursor movement keys. You can then yank and put it or delete it or whatever you need using the appropriate vim commands and keystrokes.

Answer 4

You do not have to use awk, even if the second column is not a rectangular region. Use a substitution:

:%s/ \w\+ / /

The second column is made up of at least one from word characters (\w\+) separated by blanks. The replacement is one blank. This one is for a selected range of lines:

:'<,'>s/ \w\+ / /

Answer 5

You can delete a given column in a file just from vim. In command mode use the following to delete column n:

:%s/\(.\{n-1}\).\{1}\(.*$\)/\1\2/g