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I want to apply a certain regular expression substitution globally to about 40 Javascript files in and under a directory. I'm a vim user, but doing this by hand can be tedious and error-prone, so I'd like to automate it with a script.

I tried sed, but handling more than one line at a time is awkward, especially if there is no limit to how many lines the pattern might match.

I also tried this script (on a single file, for testing):

ex $1 <<EOF gs/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/ EOF

The pattern will eliminate a trailing comma in any Perl/Ruby-style list, so that "[a, b, c,]" will come out as "[a, b, c]" in order to satisfy Internet Explorer, which alone among browsers, chokes on such lists.

The pattern works beautifully in vim but does nothing if I run it in ex, as per the above script.

Can anyone see what I might be missing?

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  • I don't know vim very well, but you can do it easily with notepad++, without scripts... Or if you really want to do it with vim, have a look at this. ibrahim-ahmed.com/2008/01/… Commented Jul 12, 2010 at 2:20

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You asked for a script, but you mentioned that you are vim user. I tend to do project-wide find and replace inside of vim, like so:

:args **/*.js | argdo %s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/ge | update

This is very similar to the :bufdo solution mentioned by another commenter, but it will use your args list rather than your buflist (and thus doesn't require a brand new vim session nor for you to be careful about closing buffers you don't want touched).

  • :args **/*.js - sets your arglist to contain all .js files in this directory and subdirectories
  • | - pipe is vim's command separator, letting us have multiple commands on one line
  • :argdo - run the following command(s) on all arguments. it will "swallow" subsequent pipes
    • % - a range representing the whole file
    • :s - substitute command, which you already know about
    • :s_flags, ge - global (substitute as many times per line as possible) and suppress errors (i.e. "No match")
    • | - this pipe is "swallowed" by the :argdo, so the following command also operates once per argument
    • :update - like :write but only when the buffer has been modified

This pattern will obviously work for any vim command which you want to run on multiple files, so it's a handy one to keep in mind. For example, I like to use it to remove trailing whitespace (%s/\s\+$//), set uniform line-endings (set ff=unix) or file encoding (set filencoding=utf8), and retab my files.

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4 Comments

I've done it with 1000+ files and no problem. It doesn't try to open files concurrently and run the script in parallel or anything fancy like that, so the buffers are inactive (the file is unloaded from memory) after argdo is done with them (unless you have the buffer open in another window). It just might take a while to get through that many files. ;)
Yep, I tried it yesterday and it worked like a champ. What a gem! Thanks!
Here's a really simple way to retab a bunch of files: :args **/*.php | argdo retab | update
I ran this code but I can't save the changes! I run :wq but when I re-open the file, all the changes will disapeat!
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1) Open all the files with vim:

bash$ vim $(find . -name '*.js')

2) Apply substitute command to all files:

:bufdo %s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/ge

3) Save all the files and quit:

:wall :q

I think you'll need to recheck your search pattern, it doesn't look right. I think where you have \_\s* you should have \_s* instead.

Edit: You should also use the /ge options for the :s... command (I've added these above).

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2 Comments

\s* matches zero or more whitespace characters.
\s* matches only spaces and tabs, I believe this replacement calls for \\_s* which also matches line breaks.
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You can automate the actions of both vi and ex by passing the argument +'command' from the command line, which enables them to be used as text filters.

In your situation, the following command should work fine:

find /path/to/dir -name '*.js' | xargs ex +'%s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/g' +'wq!'

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you can use a combination of the find command and sed

find /path -type f -iname "*.js" -exec sed -i.bak 's/,[ \t]*]/]/' "{}" +;
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It's quite probably there will be newlines between the , and the closing parenthesis.
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If you are on windows, Notepad++ allows you to run simple regexes on all opened files.

Search for ,\s*\] and replace with ]

should work for the type of lists you describe.

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