Add space after parens

Question

My Problem

I am editing a markdown file with some links in a [link text](url) format.

Some of these links lack a space after the closing parens, e.g.:

...fit the [Single Responsibility Principle](https://link...)and can ...

Which renders to a missing space after the link:

...fit the Single Responsibility Principleand can ...

I am trying to build a regex search-replace to add a missing space after the closing parens where necessary.

What have I (naively) tried

Tried search-replacing with a regex:

%s#\)(\S)#\) (\1)#gc

%s#\)                 - Closing parens
%s#\)(\S)             - Followed by a non-space
%s#\)(\S)#            - Replaced with...
%s#\)(\S)#\)          - The closing parens followed by a space
%s#\)(\S)#\) (\1)#gc  - And the original character

And, of course, Googled the problem.

My question

How can I add a space after every closing parens that has a non-space character just after it?

Answer 1

What about

%s#)\zs\ze\S# #g

By default unless you change the 'magic' option, a closing parenthesis is matched by just ). BTW, here I've cheated with :h /\zs and :h /\ze to mark the in between characters that we want to expand with a single space.

Answer 2

You can use the following command:

:g/)\([^ ]\)/s//) \1/g

Where the [^ ] means any character except space, the \(\) surrounding it is to group it and reference it later in the substitution as \1. Thus, it effectively adds a space after a ) followed by any character except a space.

But the above command does not add a space if the ) is at the end of a line. To also add spaces to those too:

:g/)\([^ ]\|$\)/s//) \1/g

Where $ represents end of line and the \| adds it to the match-any-character-except-space as an "or"

Answer 3

Try these:

# match ) followed by zero or more spaces and replace with ) and space
s/) */) /

# match ) followed by optional space and replace with ) and space
s/) \?/) /

) is not escaped here, because by default ( and ) are not special

Add g flag if you need to replace multiple occurrences in a line