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I want to perform a search and replace. A newline before any non-digit should be replaced with tab. I tried

%s/\n\D/\t/g

but it replaced the first character of the word following the newline, which is not what I wanted, i.e.

abcd
abcd

to

abcd   bcd

I want to preserve a after the newline.

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3

You're almost there, but your regular expression is replacing both the newline and the non-digit with a tab.

How about replacing every newline followed by a non-digit with a tab and that same non-digit?

%s/\n\(\D\)/\t\1/g

The escaping is a bit messy, but basically you have a grouping around the \D that will capture whatever the non-digit is. This is then referred to with \1 to insert it after the tab.

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  • If you have further groups in your search pattern, these are accessible through \2, \3 etc. This is not limited to s/.../.../ in Vim but usually works like this in most tool using s/.../.../ (most notably sed). – Kusalananda♦ Jun 24 '16 at 8:53
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    use the very magic option \v to deal with too many escapes %s/\v\n(\D)/\t\1/g – Sundeep Jun 24 '16 at 8:53
  • @spasic That's a Vim thing, right. Or where is it documented elsewhere? Actually, in this case, it doesn't make it look much prettier as you only get rid of one backslash... ;-) – Kusalananda♦ Jun 24 '16 at 9:03
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    yeah, it is specific to Vim and it makes it easier to use regex elements like ( ) | {} free of escaping.. the \V is opposite.. see :h \v for more info – Sundeep Jun 24 '16 at 9:41
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One way to do it is to use the end match marker:

%s/\n\ze\D/\t/

Another way to do it is to using negative lookahead:

%s/\n\d\@!/\t/

They are not exactly equivalent, the second will also replace the last newline in a file.

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  • Thanks Sato, both worked, but @Kusalananda replied first.... – Rohail Abbas Jun 24 '16 at 9:02
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I hope this will help you

:%s#\n.\D#\t#g
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    This has the feature that it gobbles up two characters, and it also matches digits directly after newlines, which was not wanted. Please test your answers. – Kusalananda♦ Jun 24 '16 at 6:39

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