Find lines that don't begin with a "<", perform action

Question

Am using vim and have a large text file that contains some html thrown in throoghout. Am trying to prepare it for the web and need to add <p></p> tags to the lines that are not yet formatted. Here is an example of what I have:

Paragraph text one one line [... more ... ]
Other paragraph text on the next line [... more ... ]  
<h1>html element thrown in on its own line</h1>
More paragraph text [... more ... ]  
<!-- some other element (always own line) -->
There is still more text!

I am looking for a way to search for the lines that don't begin with a < character and, for those lines, add opening and closing <p></p> tags ... so that, afterwards, my file resembles this:

<p>Paragraph text one one line [... more ... ] </p>
<p>Other paragraph text on the next line [... more ... ]   </p>
<h1>html element thrown in on its own line</h1>
<p>More paragraph text [... more ... ]   </p>
<!-- some other element (always own line ) -->
<p>There is still more text! </p>

How do I find lines that don't match a starting < character?

Answer 1

^([^<].*)$

Make sure your options disallow "Dot matching newline" and replace with:

<p>$1</p>

Vim requires you to escape certain characters, but I don't actially have vim, so this is my best guess at the whole rule:

s:^\([^<].*\)$:<p>\1</p>:g

Answer 2

here's the logic. go through the file, check for < at the start of the line, if not there, construct a new string with the <p> and </p> and echo it out. There's really no need for complicated regex

with bash

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob
while read -r line
do
    case "$line" in
        "<"*) echo $line ;;
        *) echo "<p>$line</p>";;
    esac   
done <"file"

with awk

$ awk '!/^</{$0="<p>"$0"</p>"}{print}' file

output

$ awk '!/^</{$0="<p>"$0"</p>"}1' file
<p>Paragraph text one one line [... more ... ]</p>
<p>Other paragraph text on the next line [... more ... ]  </p>
<h1>html element thrown in on its own line</h1>
<p>More paragraph text [... more ... ]  </p>
<!-- some other element (always own line) -->
<p>There is still more text!</p>

Answer 3

This should work:

:%s/^\s*[^<]\+$/<p>&<\/p>/g

Answer 4

:%s/^[^<].*/<p>&<\/p>/

alternatively:

:v/^</s#.*#<p>&</p>#

that's all that is needed.

Answer 5

Another way to do it:

:v/^</normal I<p>^O$</p>

^O is done actually pressing CTRL+o

Or, if you use the surround.vim plugin:

:v/^</normal yss<p>