Saving regexp results to a file with Vim

Question

I have an HTML file and I would like to capture all the links that are in the file and save it to another file using Vim.

I know that regex will be something like:

:g/href="\v([a-z_/]+)"/ 

but I don’t know where to go from here.

Answer 1

Place the cursor in the first row / column and try the following:

  : redir> output.txt | while search ('href = "'," We ") | exe 'normal yi"' | echo @ "| endwhile | redir END 

Answer 2

Jeff Meatball Yang was almost there.

As Sasha wrote, if you use w, he writes the full source file to outfile

To write only the matching line, you need to add '.' to 'w':

 :g/href="\v([a-z_/]+)"/ .w >> outfile 

Note that the file must exist.

Answer 3

The task here is to extract all the links where there may be several lines, otherwise you could just do:

 " Extract all lines with href= :g/href="[^"]\+"/w >> list_of_links.txt " Open the new file :e list_of_links.txt " Extract the bit inside the quotation marks :%s/.*href="\([^"]\+\)".*/\1/ 

The simplest approach would probably be to do this:

 " Save as a new file name :saveas list_of_links.txt " Get rid of any lines without href= :g!/href="\([^"]\+\)"/d " Break up the lines wherever there is a 'href=' :%s/href=/\rhref=/g " Tidy up by removing everything but the bit we want :%s/^.*href="\([^"]\+\)".*$/\1/ 

Alternatively (on a similar topic)

 :g/href="[^"]\+"/w >> list_of_links.txt :e list_of_links.txt :%s/href=/\rhref=/g :%s/^.*href="\([^"]\+\)".&$/\1/ 

(see: help saveas ,: help: vglobal ,: help: s)

However, if you really wanted to do it in a more direct way, you could do something like this:

 " Initialise register 'h' :let @h = "" " For each line containing href=..., get the line, and carry out a global search " and replace that extracts just the URLs and a double quote (as a delimiter) :g/href="[^"]\+"/let @h .= substitute(getline('.'), '.\{-}href="\([^"]\+\)".\{-}\ze\(href=\|$\)', '\1"', 'g') " Create a new file :new " Paste the contents of register h (entered in normal mode) "hp " Replace all double quotes with new-lines :s/"/\r/g " Save :w 

Finally, you can do this in a function with a for loop, but I will leave it for someone else to write!

Answer 4

clear reg: x

 qxq 

search regex (independently) and add to reg: x

 :g/regex/call setreg('X', matchstr(getline('.'), 'regex') . "\n") 

open a new tab

 :tabnew outfile 

put reg: x

 "xp 

write file

 :w 

Answer 5

Have you tried this?

: g / href = "\ v ([az _ /] +)" / w → outfile