console utility to upcase words in a buffer based on a list of words

Question

I'm not a vi/vim user - yet. I'm learning an older programming language whose compiler insists on uppercase keywords. One learning resource suggests having vi/vim inhale a list of keywords, e.g.

%s/\<import\>/IMPORT/g
%s/\<module\>/MODULE/g

using the command :so

which then gets applied to the current buffer.

I'm looking for a *nix console utility that will do the same.

Does such a utility exists? TIA

Answer 1

Assuming you have a file with Vim commands, you can apply that to a file using the Vim editor's -S option:

$ cat edits
%s/\<import\>/IMPORT/g
%s/\<module\>/MODULE/g
%s/\<bumblebee\>/BUMBLEBEE/g
%s/\<please\>/PLEASE/g
%s/\<for\>/FOR/g
%s/\<over\>/OVER/g
%s/\<do\>/DO/g
%s/\<done\>/DONE/g
wq

$ cat program
module top.

import "library".

for i over <zoidberg> -> do
        bumblebee i:th, please.
done

$ vim -S edits program
$ cat program
MODULE top.

IMPORT "library".

FOR i OVER <zoidberg> -> DO
        BUMBLEBEE i:th, PLEASE.
DONE

Note that the last wq in the edits file will save the document with the same filename as the original.

Note also that this is an unusual way to edit files from the terminal and that it's more common to use a stream editor such as sed (see below). The main issues with doing things this way is that Vim is not a non-interactive editor, and that it would read the whole document into memory before executing the editing script (which is inelegant when it's not needed). It's also cumbersome for you to have to maintain an editing script rather than a simple list of keywords.

---

Assuming you have a file with a list of lowercase keywords that needs to be turned into uppercase, one keyword per line.

A simple Perl program would turn the list into a sed editing script:

$ cat keywords
import
module
bumblebee
please
for
over
do
done

$ perl -pe 's{.*}{s/\L\\<$&\\>/\U$&\L/g}' keywords
s/\<import\>/IMPORT/g
s/\<module\>/MODULE/g
s/\<bumblebee\>/BUMBLEBEE/g
s/\<please\>/PLEASE/g
s/\<for\>/FOR/g
s/\<over\>/OVER/g
s/\<do\>/DO/g
s/\<done\>/DONE/g

What the Perl code is doing is simply to take each line and insert it into the sed expression

s/\<word\>/WORD/g

where word and WORD is the string on one of the lines in the keywords file, lower-cased and then upper-cased.

This could then be applied to your program's source code:

$ cat program
module top.

import "library".

for i over <zoidberg> -> do
        bumblebee i:th, please.
done

$ perl -pe 's{.*}{s/\L\\<$&\\>/\U$&\L/g}' keywords | sed -f /dev/stdin program
MODULE top.

IMPORT "library".

FOR i OVER <zoidberg> -> DO
        BUMBLEBEE i:th, PLEASE.
DONE

With -f /dev/stdin, sed is able to read the editing script from the output of Perl, and then apply it to the given file (here, the file called program).

Note that this simplistic substitution of words would not know about the quoting rules of your language, so it would replace any keywords found in strings etc. that may not need to be replaced.

Answer 2

You can similarly use a sed file that has your substitution patterns and then apply that sed file to your target text.

Here are contents of an example sed file named my_custom_substitutions.sed based on your substitutions above:

s/\<import\>/IMPORT/g
s/\<module\>/MODULE/g

You can see how those custom substitutions will look before actually applying it to the file like so:

sed -f my_custom_substitutions.sed targetfile.txt 

To apply those custom substitutions to the target file using sed:

sed -i -f my_custom_substitutions.sed targetfile.txt 

Another way can be to use tr:

echo "lower case text" | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'

If you want to do that from within vim for the line 2 in your file, you can do:

:2 ! tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'   

If you wanted to apply that to several lines in a range like line 2 to line 4, you can do:

:2,4  ! tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'