Re: search for absent strings

> I have a file that contains a bunch of strings such as:
>
> xx10 , xx11, xx12, xx13, ..... , xx1183
>
> I want to find out which of these 1183 strings are NOT in the file.
>
> Is there a way to do this in vim ??

Assuming that the "xx" portion is constant across each line
(instead of a regexp you're eliding), I'd do it by searching for
each pattern and building a list of those that don't match:

:let lst=[] | for i in range(1,10)| if (!search('xx'.i.'\>'))
| call add(lst, i) | endif | endfor

The value in "lst" will contain the missing indexes. For huge
volumes of data, this is inefficient as it searches the whole
document for each match. But for a mere thousand-and-change, it
should be fine. If the gaps would only ever be one missing
number, and never more-than-one, other fairly simple
manipulations could be done for larger data-sets. Otherwise, I'd
change to a full-fledged script (I'd use Python or awk since
they're my hammer of choice, but others might reach for perl,
ruby, or vim-script).

-tim

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