I have a lot of files which starts with some tags I defined.
Example:
=Title
@context
!todo
#topic
#subject
#etc
And some text (notice the blank line just before this text).
Foo
Bar
I'd like to write a Vim search command (with vimgrep) to match something before an empty line.
How do I grep only in the lines before the first blank line? Will it make quicker grep action? Please, no need to mention :grep and binary like Ag - silver search.
I know \_.* to match everything including EOL. I know the negation [^foo]. I succeed to match everything but empty lines with /[^^$]. But I didn't manage to compose my :vimgrep command. Thank you for your help!
If you want a general solution which works for any content of file let me tell you that AFAK, you can't with that form of text. You may ask why ?
vimgrep requires a pattern argument to do the search line by line which behaves exactly as the :global cmd.
For your case we need to get the first part preceding the first blank line. (It can be extended to: Get the first non blank text)
Let's call:
A :Every block of text not containing any single blank line inside
x :Blank lines
With these only 5 forms of content file you can get the first A block with vimgrep(case 2,4,5 are obvious):
1 |
2| 3 |4| 5
x |
x| A |x| AA |
A| x |A| xx |
x| AA |
Looking to your file, it is having this form:
A
x
A
x
A
the middle block causes a problem that's why you cannot split the first A unless you delimit it by some known UNIQUE text.
So the only solution that I can come up for the only 5 cases is:
:vimgrep /\_.\{-}\(\(\n\s*\n\)\+\)\@=/ %