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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I am trying to use a for loop iterator variable in a vim search pattern to determine for a range of words how man times they occur in a file. What I do so far is:

for i in range(1,40) | %s/SiTg//gn | endfor

I need the iterator variable i in the search pattern %s/S\iTg//gn to be bound by the for loop. How can I achieve this in vim?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Vimscript is evaluated exactly like the Ex commands typed in the : command-line. There were no variables in ex, so there's no way to specify them. When typing a command interactively, you'd probably use <C-R>= to insert variable contents:

:sleep <C-R>=timetowait<CR>m<CR>

... but in a script, :execute must be used. All the literal parts of the Ex command must be quoted (single or double quotes), and then concatenated with the variables:

execute 'sleep' timetowait . 'm'

In your example, you want to place the i variable into the :%s command:

for i in range(1,40) | execute '%s/S' . i . 'Tg//gn' | endfor
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Thank you. Impressive! –  brauner Mar 18 at 13:52
up vote 0 down vote

If you're not using the for loop for other purposes, you can always expand your regex to cover the whole range of numbers:

:%s/S\([1-4]0\|[1-3]*[1-9]\)Tg//gn
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Cheers. I need the for loop to consecutively show me for each specific word how many matches there were. E.g. S1Tg four times, S2Tg four times, S3Tg four times etc. –  brauner Mar 18 at 11:03
    
@brauner I see. I'm afraid you'll need to wait for a vim guru for this. –  Joseph R. Mar 18 at 11:09
    
Yeah, I'm looking for a pure vim solution. With a for loop and grep it's quite easy: for I in {1..40}; do grep -c "S${I}Tg" FILE; done. –  brauner Mar 18 at 11:13

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