Delete all text before a specific character using vim

Question

I have used curl to grab a website's code and put it in a text file. I'd like to delete all text that isn't a link! Lucky for me, all links are inside quotes, so I just need to delete all lines without https:// in them, which I have done using :g!/https:\/\//d. Now I need to delete everything to the left and right of the quotes.

Here is my dilemma:

LINE 1: RetailShop.URLs.getProductComponents = "https://example.com?emptyparam="; // random code
LINE 2: random code action="https://example.com" name="morerandomcode"

If I start by intending to delete everything to the left of the quotes, I would use something like this :%s/^.*"// but if you try it yourself, it wants to delete everything to the left of the second quote on line 1. That would delete my whole link. Let's say I use a space, :%s/^.* "// (after the * and before the "), then it would work on line 1, but not on line 2. Then when I do line 2 with :%s/^.*="// it will delete my link in line 1 because of how the link ends.

I don't want to complicate this too much. Explicitly, I need a command that deletes the FIRST quote in every line regardless of what characters come before it.

Answer 1

I am not sure what exactly you want but, let's imagine this:

Before:

LINE 1: RetailShop.URLs.getProductComponents = "https://example.com?emptyparam="; // random code
LINE 2: random code action="https://example.com" name="morerandomcode"

After:

https://example.com?emptyparam=
https://example.com

The command is :%norm! f"di"Vp, which is

1. % range for the whole buffer, following command would be run over all lines, one by one.
2. norm! execute normal mode commands without mapped things, in it's original form.
3. f" goto first "
4. di" delete everything inside "..." and put it into unnamed register
5. Vp select whole line and paste over it from unnamed register

PS, in modern vim you can omit f":

:%norm! di"Vp

PPS, if you really want to use regex, you can try following:

:%s#^.*\(https://\S\+\)".*#\1

Which will have the same effect (on a given example). It matches the whole line and submatches an https:// url, which is then used in replacement for the whole line.