Re: How can I find where one word is close to another word?

Tim,

Many thanks!

There's an answer on the Stack Exchange site. Does that method work also?

Cheers.

On Saturday, July 25, 2020 at 6:42:37 PM UTC-5, Tim Chase wrote:

On 2020-07-25 15:59, Adrian Keister wrote:
> Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their
> country.
>
> In this test, I want to find all occurrences where the word 'aid'
> is within ten words of the word 'country'. How can I do that in Vim?

It's way ugly and requires using the old regex engine[1] (asserted by
the "\%#=1" in the following pattern) to work, but this should do the
trick and be fairly DRY (only requires putting in each term once):

  \%#=1\%(\S\+\_s\+\)\{,9}\<aid\>\&\%(\S\+\_s\+\)\{,9}\<country\>

I might have a fenceposting issue where "9" should be "8" or "10",
but it should give you the foundation to mess around.  Also, I added
the "\<" and "\>" to anchor the words so you don't find things like
"I said my uncle is a country boy" (finding the "aid" in "said").
Again, season to taste for your own needs.

The cursor lands a little weirdly (especially noticable if you have
syntax highlighting turned on) because it starts from the point at
which "within the next N words you'll find "aid" and within the next N
words you'll also find "country".

Alternatively, if you don't mind typing your literals more than once,
you can do

  /\<aid\>\%(\_s\+\S\+\)\{,10}\_s\+\<country\>\|\<country\>\%(\_s\+\S\+\)\{,10}\_s\+\<aid\>

which will highlight a little more neatly at the cost of extra typing.
However, it also doesn't scale as well if you have more than 2 words
because you need to provide every possible ordering.  The method at
the top scales easily for however many words you want within an
N-word range.

Hopefully one or the other works well for you.  

-tim


[1] For the record, the new regex engine gives me an

  E363: pattern uses more memory than 'maxmempattern'

where the old engine works fine.

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