Created a formatted list of percentages efficiently

Question

Let's say we wanted to produce the following text in a very "vim" way:

Row 1 {
  33.33%;
}
Row 2 {
  66.66%;
}
Row 3 {
  100%;
}

This isn't too complicated, but I think of it as a standin for something far more annoying, like having 12 rows (which might happen in CSS, for instance). I'm not interested in writing a whole plugin, because I think that is excessive.

Something I don't know too much about yet is using expressions () or making throw-away mappings. I bet these would lead to really clever, really nice ways.

It might be that the "right" way is to be clever with a macro involving :put =1.0/3 or something (this performs the division). But I'm not sure how to properly increment the numerator in this sort of expression.

It might be the "right" way to open a scratch buffer, write a quick throwaway function, and call it. But really, this is a very large hammer for a very small nail. There is some length of list where this would become more efficient than simply typing it, though.

There might be :ex magic or a really convenient commandline tool that I should pipe into vim, too.

There are so many options, and I'm not sure which are reasonable, and which are in the vim way.

To make this clear, I am not looking for the shortest way as in true code-golf, but instead a way that is extensible and comparable to making other formatted lists of numbers

Answer 1

I don't think there's going to be a non-horrible way to do this in Vim without a plugin.

If I absolutely had to do it within Vim, without just typing it out, I would call out to awk:

:r!awk 'BEGIN { for(i=1; i<4; i++) { print "Row " i " {"; print "\t" 100/3*i "\%;"; print "}"; } }'

Answer 2

This is really long and ugly, but here goes...

1. Generating a list of initial numbers:

   i1<esc>qqyyp<C-a>q@q
   

   1
   2
   3
   

   If you need more, add n@@ to the end of this, where n is the amount of numbers more than three you need (i.e. if you want 20%, 40%, ..., 100%, then just append a 2@@).

2. Convert these to percentages:

   V?1<cr>:s:.*:\=100.0*submatch(0)/3<cr>
   

   33.333333
   66.666667
   100.0
   

   I used : as the separator for s to avoid having to escape the / in the replacement section (which for some reason doesn't work), but you could use any other character as well.

   Also, this question taught me about \=! Found it via Google. submatch(0) is simply the entire matched text.

3. Add the rest of the formatting:

   gv:s/^/Row {\r  /<cr>gvj:s/\([0-9]\)$/\1%\r}<cr>
   

   Row {
     33.333333%
   }
   Row {
     66.666667%
   }
   Row {
     100.0%
   }
   

   Sorry, this doesn't add the row numbers. I have to go now, further explanation will be added later.

The full thing:

i1<esc>qqyyp<C-a>q@qV?1<cr>:s:.*:\=100.0*submatch(0)/3<cr>gv:s/^/Row {\r  /<cr>gvj:s/\([0-9]\)$/\1%\r}<cr>