Re: How to substitute (lower) case in a pattern like in perl-ish example

Tim, thank you for pointing out the help ( :help s/\L ) for the case replacement and more specifically the how to end the case replacement using the \e or \E... it probably should have been intuitive on how to find the correct ending using the help, but your reply pointed me in the right direction..   thanks again

On Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 12:37:05 PM UTC-5 v...@tlinx.org wrote:

Is there an 'easy' (:-)) (I could write a program, but not exactly my
idea of an easy editing task)...still might end up being the fastest
way to do this...) way to change case of a 'bunch' of identifiers
delimited by curly brackets in a 'block' of text?

I.e. I have a module that currently uses variables of the form:

pkg{VARA}=pkg2{VAR_B}+$offsetp->{VC};

The part that I want to change is the 'upper' case tag in curly
brackets to lower case. So what I'd like is something like a
combination substitute and "tr" (character translate), so I can
do (spaces added for clarity, and using a perl-ish syntax, cuz if I
knew the vim syntax, I'd just use it :-) ):

: '<,'> s / { ([A-Z_]\+) } / { (? { $1=~tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/ } ) } /xg <- vimish
:<range>s / L (capture ) L / L (? { evaluate-able expr. } ) L <- legend

where - the parens in the first part captures the sub expression;
- above the 'L' in the legend are literal curly braces, delimiting
the captured expression in the search-string, and added back as
literals to the replacement string.
- and everything in (?{replacement-expr}) with the evaluated contents
of a "tr" (translate) substitution operator that operates on
the left-variable of the "=~" expression -- so "tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/"
would replace every char in the captured-sub-expression (represented
by "$1") that matches in the 1st range "[A-Z]" to it's corresponding
character in the target range "[a-z]" and return the result as the
contents of the replacement sub-expression "(?{$1=~tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/})",
which would itself be between the two literal curly brackets in the
replacement string.

==== that's "it" ====

Equivalently, if I could run the same command in perl (I have the
perl5.8.dll, but it doesn't seem to be integrated in a way to
do this:
: '<,'> <-- starting with a vi "Visual" range, and appending a perl
command to operate on the range like:
: '<,'> perl 's/ {([A-Z_]+)} / { (?{$1=~tr/A-Z/[a-z]/}) } /xg' <- vimish
' <-- perl expression between single quotes --> ' <- legend

So what would be the equivalent line of vim-code to do what
I want above? I happen to know the perlish way to do it (or at
least I think I do -- haven't tried the above to be honest, but it
was more intended to communicate what I want than being a working
perl example :-), mostly because I know the POSIX (*nix) search and
command set (I believe 'tr' the utility is also part of the POSIX
system command set, and perl was originally designed as an amalgamation
of of several commands that have ended up being part of the POSIX
command set.

Only problem with perl is it didn't include the 'vi[m]' editor :-).
I'm sure 'vim' would somehow be a great feature addition
in perl 5.12. (Perl6, being a fairly different language from its
predecessors, doesn't appear to fulfill the mission of being the
next version or evolution of perl5.8 or 5.10. Apparently the author
admits he only chose the name "perl6" for the perl-name recognition,
not because it was intended to be a compatible upgrade, operators and
variable syntax have even changed.)

BTW, is there a way (or a reason why the ability was disabled) to
always use "very magic" for interactive regular expressions? Sure
would help me in remembering more of the expression syntax. I never
know if I need an extra "\" to make something have it be treated
as its 'normal' Regex character function (magic) vs. being treated
as a literal without trying to look it up in a chart -- and even
then it's confusing with things like square-brackets not being
symmetric in their backslash requirements. I understand the logic
of why it is the way it is, but that doesn't mean it's not a
different logic and mind-set from where 'symmetry' would take
precedence over necessity.

Thanks for any help & pointers...
-Linda

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