How do I extract the parameters from a URL in Vim?

Question

If I type a URL and I want to extract the parameters from the query string quickly in VIM how would I do that?

For instance if I have:

http://www.somesite.org/page2014.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=eventlinkonwall&utm_term=trapshoot&utm_content=calendar_event_on_wall&utm_campaign=trapshoot2014

I want to end up with something close to:

utm_source=facebook
utm_medium=eventlinkonwall
utm_term=trapshoot
utm_content=calendar_event_on_wall
utm_campaign=trapshoot2014

Answer 1

What about:

df?:s/&/\r/g

• df? to delete everything up to & including the first ?
• :s/&/\r/g to replace every & with a newline

You could prefix this with either ^ to go the start of the line, or B to go to the start of the word; use whatever is appropriate in the scenario. Be careful with automatically adding B in a keybind or command though, because if you're on the first character of the URL it will go to the word before the URL!

This will only work on well-formed URLs, the web would not be the web if there weren't a bunch of malformed URLs floating around ;-) Specifically, URL's which omit the ? and just use &key=value to start the first parameter seem to be common.
To fix this, you could search for either the first ?, OR the first &, which is unfortunately a bit more typing:

d/[?&]<CR>x:s/&/\r/g

The <CR> is the enter key.

If you do this sort of thing often, you could map it to a key:

:nnoremap <Leader>p df?:s/&/\r/g<CR>
:nnoremap <Leader>p d/[?&]<CR>x:s/&/\r/<CR>

Or make a command out of it:

:command! SplitURL exe 'normal df?'|:s/&/\r/g

Answer 2

Try:

:s/[?&]\ze.\{-}=[^&\r[:blank:]]\+/\r/g

It replaces all ? and & ([?&]) with new line (\r) which are followed by a=b patterns ending with &, new line or space characters.

Where:

• \zs and \ze - Is the start and end of a pattern (these can be used independently).
• [?&] - Match either ? or & character.
• .\{-} - Non-greedy quantifier which match as few as possible characters.
• [^&\r[:blank:]] - Match all characters which are NOT &, new line, space and tab characters.

Answer 3

If you're not doing this a lot of times, it's pretty quick to do it manually:

1. df?: Delete to the start of the parameters,
2. f&: Jump to the next parameter
3. rEnter: Replace the & with a newline,
4. Then just mash ;. repeatedly until you've separated all the parameters. (; jumps forward to the next occurrence of the last f command, and . repeats the last edit operation.)

Depending on how many parameters there are, it won't be many more keypresses that the answers already posted using :substitute, but, for me at least, it requires even less brainpower.