Re: Substitution of metacharacters

[Christian Brabandt]

Hi Bob!

On Do, 24 Mai 2012, Bob von Knobloch wrote:

> Hi, I've searched all over but can't find an answer. How can one perform
> commands like ':%s/\n/\r\r/g' (replacing newlines or tabs etc.) in the
> gui's 'find and replace' dialogue?

Not possible, the replace text is escaped:

,----[ gui.c ]-
|5276 ga_concat(&ga, (char_u *)"/");
|5277 /* escape / and \ */
|5278 p = vim_strsave_escaped(repl_text, (char_u *)"/\\");
`----

Here is an experimental patch against the gtk gui, that adds an extra
flag, and allows to replace with special chars ,e.g. \t for Tab

Looking at the dialog, it could possibly also get some more
possibilities, e.g. a confirm/undo button, perhaps even more.

regards,
Christian

[Ben Fritz]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:14:35 PM UTC-5, Christian Brabandt wrote:
>
> Looking at the dialog, it could possibly also get some more
> possibilities, e.g. a confirm/undo button, perhaps even more.
>

Well, there's this in todo.txt:

7 More features in the find/replace dialog:
- regexp on/off
- search in selection/buffer/all buffers/directory
when all buffers/directory is used:
- filter for file name
when directory is used:
- subdirectory on/off
- top directory browser

[Christian Brabandt]

Here is an even improved version of the patch, which adds the buttons
Undo and Redo to the gtk and motif version and which adds an extra
parameter whether to search/replace literally.

regards,
Christian

[Christian Brabandt]

One more update:
- Replace should work better now (and works like in the current
version of Gvim).
- When using REPLACE, the cursor is positioned at the next match,
but it doesn't take into account, that it could match at the
current cursor position (so adding the flag SEARCH_START to the
do_search function) (simple example, search for \. in the gui and
replace it by A, you'll notice, it will only replace every other
character).

regards,
Christian
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