How to store all occurrences of a multiline search in a register?

Question

I'm not sure if I've failed at searching for the answer to this, but now I've worked it out I wanted to document it here. The problem is searching for a multiline pattern, and storing all such occurrences in a register.

I am trying to look for calls to a particular function, e.g. func(a, b, c);, so that I can extract them to a separate file. I'm doing this in Vim (rather than using, say, sed or awk), because I find Vim's searching over multiple lines syntax easiest.

If I search for a pattern, I know I can store the line(s) containing the results in a register:

:let @a=''
:g/func\s*([^;]*;/y A

Stores all the single line calls to func in @a.

Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work if I adapt this search pattern to find multiple line calls:

/func\s*(\_.\{-\}; matches multi-line calls such as:

func(a, b,
c,
d);

-- no matter how many new lines/parameters are in the way, but the corresponding global command :g/func\s*(\_.\{-\};/y A just stores the first line of each match. I can sort of understand why this happens (y yanks the line the result is on, and doesn't know it takes multiple lines).

How can I adapt the command to store all lines of each occurrence in a register?

Answer 1

It turns out something along these lines works (although there might well be better ways) -- using a substitute-without-substituting command instead of a global command:

Starting with the answer here: How to show all unique types of a pattern?

:%s/[A-Za-z]*\>/\=add(b:types, submatch(0))/ng

I went with:

let @a=''
:%s/func\s*(\_[^;]\{-\};/\=setreg('A', submatch(0)."\n")/ng

Which stores all the calls, even the entirety of multi-line ones. because the A is capitalised, it's appended, as before. The "n" means to not actually do a substitute, and for completeness "g" means all occurrences on each line.

EDIT: Previously I'd tried appending '\n' or '\r' to put each match on a new line -- but they came out literally. Instead appending "\n" puts each match on a new line. Thanks to @Jair for the new line fix -- I didn't know single and double quotes were different, and didn't think to try the other!

Answer 2

To yank a last multiline search pattern into register with a multiline non-greedy pattern, try:

/func(\_.\{-});/norm gn"iy

then you'll have your yanked multiline pattern (between func( and );) in your @i register (print by echo @i).

Here is the command line example as per this post given func.txt input file:

$ ex +'sil /func\_.\{-});/norm gny' +'redi>>/dev/stdout|echon @"' -scq! func.txt
func(a, b,
c,
d);

Related:

• How to print a multi-line match?
• How can I yank multiple lines into a register?