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I'm aware that :g/<body/ .,/body>/d can be used to delete everything within the multi-line selection betweeh <body and body>.

I'm also aware that :g!/<pattern>/d can be used to delete all lines not matching the pattern.

How do I combine these 2 to delete everything except the the multi-line selection?

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  • This will be very complex to be done in Vim. You can use the decorare, sort, undecorate pattern to achive this. But I doubt this is easily doable with a vim oneliner
    – Christian Brabandt
    Commented Nov 5, 2021 at 22:27

1 Answer 1

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Best to delegate that task to Sed. Any of these work:

:%!sed '/<body/,/body>/\!d'
:%!sed -n '/<body/,/body>/p'

Note that the exclamation mark needs to be escaped lest Vim itself does something with it. If the regex gets fairly complicated I suggest running Sed from the shell because it might be a pain escaping Vim meta-characters.

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  • You could maybe combine execute with shellescape or similar
    – D. Ben Knoble ♦
    Commented Nov 5, 2021 at 20:44

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