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I'm trying to write a replacement command that would search for a text containing at least 4 letters separated by spaces and remove the spaces:
%s/\v%(([a-zA-Z])\s){3,}([a-zA-Z])/\1\2/gc
But
L i g ht
becomes
ght
as expected because a group contains only the last match which was g in that case. How to accumulate all the matches of group \1 and then join them?
Given a repeated group like (...){n,m} or (...)+, I don't think there's any way in to Vim extract each occurrence of the group. Only the last is made available in all regex-related functions and commands.
That said, you can use a nested substitution:
:s/\v%([a-zA-Z]\s){3,}[a-zA-Z]/\=substitute(submatch(0), '\s', '', 'g')/gc
A \= in the replacement of :s makes Vim evaluate the replacement as an expression. And in that expression, I'm using the substitute() function to remove all spaces in the entire matched text of :s (obtained by submatch(0)), giving Ligh from L i g h.
