Regex

Let's assume that we have some sample text like the following:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

While transferring a file to a remote server is pretty easily done using PuTTY's sister program, pscp, sometimes one finds oneself to be too lazy to go through the steps required. Shouldn't it be possible to simply copy and paste the (text) file into a remote editor via PuTTY? It is and it works a peach. However, it does crack the shits every now and then complaining about the length of the clipboard (paste).

Some documents contain paragraphs which are wrapped often at the 80 character mark to help with formatting and readability. This is sometimes accomplished using forced line breaks which can be quite annoying especially when you want to reverse it as I did earlier today. Rather than messing with regex and weird edge cases, use Vim which provides a lovely solution! Here it be:

Just now while attempting to perform a substitution in GVim, I found that the regex was not working as expected. Apparently, instead of matching all non-whitespace characters denoted by the shorthand class \S, the engine was matching the letter S instead, which was odd. It turns out that, as usual, I was the one at fault. What I was doing wrong was attempting to use the character class within [] groups.

Today, I made quite an impression on my furniture thanks to incessant contact between it and my illustrious head. This, as usual, was due to my looking for a clean regex to solve my issue while working with text files in Vim. My task was, I initially believed, quite simple: delete all the lines that are sandwiched between two types/patterns of lines. In this case, the top slice of the sandwich consisted of a line which was entirely a number and the bottom slice was a line entirely populated with underscores.

Some people like to indent their code using TABs. I used to like doing this. I still think that it's a good idea. But circumstances have dictated for the past several years that I need to indent using spaces instead. My favourite command-line editor in Linux and text editor in Windows is VIM / Gvim (where Gvim is basically Vim with a GUI). To configure this editor to override its default and use spaces instead of TABs for indentation, perform the following steps: