Vi and Vim Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people using the vi and Vim families of text editors. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am trying to use the join command to join multiple strings. The join command seems to add one character of space in between each of the strings. But I don't want any space added.
As an example, I'm working on a function that finds the associated .pdf file of a .tex file. So if I'm editing the file /home/user/paper.tex, I would like to create the string /home/user/paper.pdf. My attempt is
join([expand('%:p:r'), '.pdf'])
which returns /home/user/paper .pdf
From :help join():
join({list} [, {sep}])
[..]
When {sep} is specified it is put in between the items. If
{sep} is omitted a single space is used.
[..]
So the solution is to add an empty string in the second sep parameter:
:echo join([expand('%:p:r'), '.pdf'])
/usr/share/vim/vim81/doc/eval .pdf
:echo join([expand('%:p:r'), '.pdf'], '')
/usr/share/vim/vim81/doc/eval.pdf
In this case you don't really need to use join() by the way, and could just use:
:echo expand('%:p:r') . '.pdf'
:help expression-syntax . In this context '.' is string concatenation.
:help join and :help join() bring you to different parts of the help section.