How would I create a VIM or Vi command to delete all text after a certain character for every line in a text file?

Question

Scenario:

• I have a text file that has pipe (as in the "|" character) delimited data.
• Each field of data in the pipe delimited fields can be of variable length, so counting characters won't work (or using some sort of substring function... if that even exists in VIM).

Is it possible, using VIM / Vi to delete all data from the second pipe to the end of the line for the entire file? There are approx 150,000 lines, so doing this manually would only be appealing to a masochist...

e.g.

Change the following lines from:

1111|random sized text 12345|more random data la la la|1111|abcde

2222|random sized text abcdefghijk|la la la la|2222|defgh

3333|random sized text|more random data|33333|ijklmnop

to:

1111|random sized text 12345

2222|random sized text abcdefghijk

3333|random sized text

I'm sure this can be done somehow... I hope.

TIA

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I'm running this on Windows XP, so I don't have access to some of the mentioned *nix commands (CUT is not recognized on Windows).

Answer 1

:%s/^\v([^|]+\|[^|]+)\|.*$/\1/

Answer 2

I've found that vim isn't great at handling very large files. I'm not sure how large your file is. Maybe cat and sed together would work better.

Answer 3

Here is a sed solution:

sed -e 's/^\([^|]*|[^|]*\).*$/\1/'

Answer 4

Why use vim?

Why not just do

cat my_pipe_file | cut -d'|' -f1-2

HTH

cheers,

Rob

Answer 5

If you don't have to use vim, another alternative would be the unix "cut" command.

cut -d '|' -f 1-2 file > out.file

Answer 6

You can also record a macro:

qq02f|Djq

and then you will be able to play it with 100@q to run the macro on the next 100 lines.

Macro explanation:

• qq - starts macro recording
• 0 - go to the first character of the line
• 2f| - find the second occurrence of the | character on the line
• D - delete the text after the current position to the end of the line
• j - go to the next line
• q - ends macro recording

Answer 7

You can also do:

:%s/^\([^\|]\+|[^\|]\+\)\|.*$/\1/g

Answer 8

This will filter all lines in the buffer (1,$) through cut to do the job.

:1,$!cut -d '|' -f 1-2

Try with

:.!cut -d '|' -f 1-2

To do it only on the current line.

Answer 9

Just another vim way to do the same thing:

%s/^\(.\{-}|\)\{2}\zs.*//
%s/^\(.\{-}\zs|\)\{2}.*// " if you want to remove the 2nd pipe as well

This time, the regex matches as few (\{-}) charaters as possible that are followed by a pipe, and twice (\{2}), they are ignored (\zs) to replace all following (\z**s**) text by nothing.

Answer 10

Use :command to make a user command you can easily run.

:command -range=% YourNameHere <line1>,<line2>s/^\v([^|]+\|[^|]+)\|.*$/\1/

Answer 11

use awk.

awk -F"|" '{$0=$1"|"$2}1' file