Vimgrep before any empty line

Question

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!

Answer 1

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 ?

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• Explanation:

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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 | A

A | A | x | A | x

x | x | A

A |

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.

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So the only solution that I can come up for the only 5 cases is:

:vimgrep /\_.\{-}\(\(\n\s*\n\)\+\)\@=/ %

Answer 2

[...] always matches a single character. [^^$] matches a character that is not ^ or $. This is not what you want.

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One of the things you can do is:

/\%^\%(.\+\n\)\{-}.\{-}\zsfoo/

This matches

• \%^ - the beginning of the file
• \%( \) - a non-capturing group
• \{-} - ... repeated 0 or more times (as few as possible)
• .\+ - 1 or more non-newline characters
• \n - a newline
• .\{-} - 0 or more non-newline characters (as few as possible)
• \zs - the official start of the match

This will find the first occurrence of foo, starting from the beginning of the file, searching only non-empty lines. But that's all it does: You can't use it to find multiple matches.

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Alternatively:

/\%(^\n\_.*\)\@<!foo/

• \%( \) - a non-capturing group
• \@<! - not-preceded-by modifier
• ^ - beginning of line
• \n - newline
• \_.* - 0 or more of any character

This matches every occurrence of foo that is not preceded anywhere by an empty line (i.e. a beginning-of-line / newline combo).

Answer 3

AFAIK the most you can do with :vimgrep is use the \%<XXl atom to search below a specific line number:

:vim /\%<20lfunction/ *.vim

That command will find all instances of function above line 20 in the given files.

See :help \%l.