Re: how can you delete every line between two phrases?

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Tim Chase <vim@tim.thechases.com> wrote:
> On 12/02/12 20:15, Jiaxing Wang wrote:
>> In :g/how are you?/.;/:-)/d,
>> Is '/how are you?/.;/:-)/' the pattern in
>> :[range]g[lobal]/{pattern}/[cmd]?
>> Would you mind explaining this pattern a little? I don't quite
>> understand this, thanks.
>
> Using your template of ":[range]global]/{pattern}/[cmd]" it breaks
> down as
>
> :g/how are you?/[cmd]
>
> where [cmd] is
>
> .;/:-)/d
>
> which is a range from the currently matching "how are you?" line
> through the next line containing ":-)". The Ex command issued over
> that range is "d"elete. If you read at
>
> :help :range
>
> you'll see the "/" is a way of specifying an address. You can even
> stack them if you want, such as
>
> +3;/hello/?world?+2
>
> which will start the range 3 lines after the currently matching
> line, and end the range at the location found by searching forwards
> to "hello", then backwards to "world", and then going forwards two
> lines. It's a bit of a crazy example, but sometimes that's exactly
> what you need to specify the range you want. A recent real-world
> example from my own use was something like:
>
> :g/^\s*def [^(]*[pP]rovider/+1;'}?DEBUG?s/^/#
>
> which commented out ("s/^/#") the lines in Python code after the
> function definition, through the last DEBUG in the current paragraph
> (as marked by '}).
>
> The difference between using ";" (as I do) and using "," is one of
> those things I don't fully grasp as it seems to be fairly
> interchangeable in other contexts. But in this use-case as a
> destination for :g commands, I find that I almost always want ";".
> This is tersely documented at
>
> :help :;
>
> I hope that helps disassemble my answer so that you can go do crazy
> things with vim and impress your colleagues, too. :-)
>
> -tim


I looked at :help :range as Tim suggested above. Just want to see if I
understand correctly. Does vim do addressing like sed? That seems to
be what I see.

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