Here's the scenario (fictional, but not too far removed from real life): I want to munge some data I have into code. Let's say I have this in my editor:
The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night
and the result I want is this:
THE_COMEDY_OF_ERRORS = "The Comedy of Errors" MUCH_ADO_ABOUT_NOTHING = "Much Ado About Nothing" TWELFTH_NIGHT = "Twelfth Night"
My editor of choice is vim and I like to run in a Unix (these days that usually means Linux) environment. Given those tools, here's one way to do it.
In command mode, I type 3yy (yank three lines), move the
cursor to the line where I want to put them and hit p (for put).
The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night
I use the bang command to pipe the first three lines through
sed 's/ /_/g'. (To pipe three lines through a shell command,
type 3!! in command mode, then type the command at the colon
prompt at the bottom of the screen.) This sed command replaces
all spaces with underscores, leaving:
The_Comedy_of_Errors Much_Ado_About_Nothing Twelfth_Night The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night
I pipe the first three lines through perl -pe 's/\w+/uc($&)/e'.
This forces all letters to uppercase, leaving:
THE_COMEDY_OF_ERRORS MUCH_ADO_ABOUT_NOTHING TWELFTH_NIGHT The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night
I pipe the last three lines through awk '{ print " = \"" $0 "\""}'. This inserts an equals sign and surrounds the
original lines with (simple) double quotes.
THE_COMEDY_OF_ERRORS MUCH_ADO_ABOUT_NOTHING TWELFTH_NIGHT = "The Comedy of Errors" = "Much Ado About Nothing" = "Twelfth Night"
At this point, it's a simple process to move the lines to their correct places
using a combination of dd (delete line) and
p (put line) and J (join lines) to
get my desired result.
Things that really help when using this kind of approach:
- an open shell window nearby to try one-liners on test data
- trustworthy multiple levels of undo/redo
- lots of practice with editor basics