awk and vi trick

Global search and replace with regular expressions is one of the things that keeps me using vi. (Tags and cscope are the other two features I really like.

Here's a variant of that task that uses awk.

The intial text was:

Men     Formal
Men     Casual

and the goal text was:

        TestDialog(1, "Men", "Formal"),
        TestDialog(2, "Men", "Casual"),

The vi command to do this is (take out new lines, blogger keeps wrapping my pre text).

:.,.+1!awk -F "\t" '{
printf "\tTestDialog(
\%d, 
\"\%s\", 
\"\%s\"
),\n", 
NR, $1, $2}'

Getting the escaping right is a bit awkward, but the benefit is you have no worries about typos, and it applies to 18 rows of data just as easly as two rows.