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From: patkar@ecn.purdue.edu (Anant Y Patkar)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: A vi question
Keywords: vi, substitute
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.130232@ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 16:32:32 GMT
References: <1990Aug12.194738.7902@ecn.purdue.edu> <14420003@hp-lsd.COS.HP.COM> <401@taumet.com>
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In article <401@taumet.com>, steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:
|> |:%s/cc*/c/g
|> |:%s/oo*/o/g
|> |:%s/ss*/s/g
|> 
|> This then also changes
|> 	'accent' to 'acent'
|> 	'loop' to 'lop'
|> 	'ass' to 'as'.
|> I wonder if that is what the original poster had in mind.

  Just to clear the confusion.  What I needed was to change
  quadruple occurances of any letter to a single occurance.
  That means if I use individual substitute commands for each
  letter, I am stuck with 52 commands (some files I have need
  more commands to take care of some other characters).

  Also it should change only quadruple occurances.  I don't want
  any spelling mistakes in the resulting file.  The solutions I 
  received my mail indicate that (possibly) there is no way to
  do this using the "ex" commands.  You have to invoke some UNIX
  commands like 'sed' from inside vi to do this.

  Hope this helps!

  -- Anant
 (patkar@cn.ecn.purdue.edu)