Conditional substitution in VIM

Question

Is there a way to set Negate in the substitution command? In other words how to substitute any character except | to - and all | to +. Example:

| some text | other text |

to

+-----------+------------+

Is there a shortest way than :s/[^|]/-/g | s/|/+/g ?

Answer 1

You can use the replace special substitution:

:s/./\= submatch(0) == '|' ? '+' : '-'/g

Here \= says to use the following expression to use as the result string.

And it's checking for submatch(0) (the char matched by the /./ pattern) and do a condition on that.

Have a look at:

• :h sub-replace-special
• :h submatch()

Answer 2

As an alternative you can use the system's tr program:

:.!tr '| -z' '+-'