Re: How can I do this?

On 1/25/2011 1:08 PM, meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:

Hi,  sorry for being not more specific in the Subject line to my posting -- I didnt want to put the whole into it... ;)  I have two files. One "master" and one "copy".  Both consists of lines like this  <category> <parameter> <value>  ' ' is a simply space  The <parameter> consists of <word1>-<word2>-<word3>, where the count of different words is not constant over the lines.  Now I want to replace all lines in the "copy"-file, which have a certain <word> in its parameter with the line of the "master"-file with the same "<category> <parameter>" combination in it.  There may be lines in the "copy"-file with parameters matching <word> which do not have a counterpart in the "master"-file. Those should be printed.  Is this possible within vim?  

Yes, possible, but you would have to write Vim script to do it.

If you are interested in writing this (i.e. you will have to do this many times over the years, not just once), then I would suggest you start with my WhatsMissing plugin:
http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=1108

It does some of what you want:
1.  Cycles through a number of words in the master file
2.  Switches buffers to the slave file
3.  Checks if the word exists
4.  Writes out the "missing" (or "not missing") words to another buffer
5.  Switches back to the master file and moves to the next word

You can easily modify that logic to do what you need where the basic logic stays the same.

Best of luck.
Dave