Pretty print in VIM?

Question

I have few lines that each of them are colon separated values,

abc:def:3

Now I could do the reformat with printf plus IFS variable,

while read line; do IFS=":" printf "%-20s %-16s %5d\n" ${line[0]} ${line[1]} ${line[2]}; done < XX

but is it possible to do it within VIM?

Answer 1

Well, in the vi spirit, you'd call a command to do it like:

:%!column -ts:

(if you have column and it supports the -s option).

Otherwise you could do:

:%s/[^:]\+/                                        &/g
:%s/\v^ *([^:]{20}): *([^:]{16}): *([^:]{5})/\1:\2:\3/