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Let's say, I want to search for email addresses and output them to a new file. What I can do so far with a help from another discussion is this:
g/pattern/.w! >> output.txt
but that saves whole lines where search matches occur. Is it possible to extract just the matches (with possibility for them to be multiple on one line)? I would prefer a solution (if possible) without some additional plugins or macros.
This is a bit easier with grep and the --only-matching/-o option.
grep -o 'pattern' file.txt > output.txt
You can use Vim's substitution as well:
:%s/.*\(pattern\).*/\1
This approach will affect the current buffer though. It would probably be best to copy the file first.
Note: these approachs assumes only 1 match per line
Peter's solution with grep -o is the way to go IMO.
Yet, for the sake of the exercise here is a 100% pure vim script solution
" prepare the result variable to be of the right type
:let res = []
" join all lines in a big string, and use `substitute` to fill the result with matches -- this is the only tricky part
:call substitute(join(getline(1,'$'), ' '), 'THE PATTERN', '\=add(res, submatch(0))', 'g')
" You can remove duplicates BTW with
:let res = uniq(sort(res))
" And save into a new file
:call writefile(res, 'FILENAME')
If you in Windows and don't have an access to bash commands and want to do it from VIM in any case.
g/.Low rates./-1,+2.w! >> failures.txt
Will find all lines with the pattern .Low rates. Copy 1 line before the pattern, 2 lines after, and redirect all occurrences of the pattern to a file failures.txt.
