Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pilchuck!ssc!fyl
From: fyl@ssc.UUCP (Phil Hughes)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: A vi question
Summary: it works with ed, why not vi
Keywords: vi, substitute
Message-ID: <149@ssc.UUCP>
Date: 20 Aug 90 19:09:26 GMT
References: <1990Aug12.194738.7902@ecn.purdue.edu> <14420003@hp-lsd.COS.HP.COM> <1990Aug16.130232@ecn.purdue.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: SSC, Inc., Seattle, WA
Lines: 26

In article <1990Aug16.130232@ecn.purdue.edu>, patkar@ecn.purdue.edu (Anant Y Patkar) writes:

>   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).

>                                                 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.

Here is my solution which worked fine in ed but does not work in vi
(which I don't understand).  I expect that ex would be happy with it
as well but didn't try it.  Anyway, the idea is to just look for any
character followed by 3 more of the same character and replace it by
one of the character. 

%s/\(.\)\1\1\1/\1/g

(And to think I avoided the "remember this" constructs for years. :-)

-- 
Phil Hughes, SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549, Seattle, WA 98155  (206)FOR-UNIX
     uunet!pilchuck!ssc!fyl or attmail!ssc!fyl            (206)527-3385