Thursday, December 18, 2014

Re: Can the "<" char be escaped with a backslash in Vim keymaps?

Erik wrote:
> On 15.12.14 12:09, BPJ wrote:
> > > The reason I'm asking is that I'm writing something which parses
> > > keymaps and turns them into another something which a third something
> > > can use to transliterate strings.

> Is your task amenable to using simple methods? E.g.:

> $ echo Ewokhbhs laoohmf rsqhmfr akrn vnqj | tr "[a-y]" "[b-z]"

> In Vim it is so quick and easy to run a line or paragraph through an
> external filter, to be replaced with the filter's output. What could be
> niftier.

Alas it is not. By transliteration I mean things like changing the
two-character sequence "ch" into the single Cyrillic letter "ч"
(U+0447), so the tr utility won't be up to the task. Moreover I'm
doing this outside of Vim, transcribing text files batchwise
programmatically, it's just that I have the needed replacements
already written up as Vim keymaps, so I'm writing a script to
convert Vim keymaps into the correspondence tables needed by the
script doing the file transliteration. (The latter basically
imports the correspondence table as an associative array and
constructs a huge regular expression from the keys, then does a
single longest-leftmost substitution pass. See here for the
theoretical background:
<http://interglacial.com/~sburke/braille/tpj_article.txt>.
(BTW Sean M. Burke's self-description "likes making linguists
think he's a programmer, and programmers think he's a linguist"
would fit me very well too! ;-)

> -- I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. - Poul Anderson

Great quote from a great writer, BTW!

Mathias Rav wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 12:09 PM, BPJ wrote:
> > > Can the "<" (less-than/left angle bracket) char be escaped with backslash in Vim keymaps? Or to put it otherwise: which characters can be escaped with a backslash in a keymap?

> :help mbyte-keymap also says that the first column can be in <> form.
> Did you try using <lt> instead of \<?

Of course I did, that being the normal way, but I wanted to cover
all possibilities I might encounter.
However it seems that `\"` and `\\` *are* the only legit backslash
escapes in Vim keymaps, so I will continue to only support those two.

Anyway thanks for answering both of you!

/bpj

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