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I have a multi-line string that I'm reading by:

let a = getreg('*')

What would be the best way to get the first line of that string? I was hoping I could do something like:

  • match
  • getbufline

But am having trouble finding the necessary string function to do this. In python it'd be something like: str.split('\n')[0]

If helpful, when I do echom a the output looks like:

enter image description here

Also, what is ^@ in vim? I've seen ^M for linebreak (return) but have never seen ^@ before.

Update: After some investigation it seems like that's the nul or \0 byte, and can be entered in by doing ctrlv ctrl@. And I ended up using this:

let first_line = matchstr(register, '\v<[^\n]+>')

It's very odd that this regex is what's used, as I tried doing something basic like `\v^.+$' and although it would work on a search page, it returned no results when I tried to search the register with it...

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Normally I prefer let a = getreg('*', 1, 1)[0] which is a bit shorter than let a = split(getreg('*'), "\n")[0] and does the same thing.

However, in your case the register contents for some reason contains Nul bytes (see :h NL-used-for-Nul). Hence you have to split on Nul manually: let a = split(getreg('*'), '^@')[0]

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  • oh that's so much better/easier than what I came up with, thank you! What is the second arg in getreg ? In :h it just says 1 and nothing else (the third argument seems to be whether to return it as a string (default) or list (1). – David542 Jun 14 '20 at 4:19
  • @David542 It's for expression register (=) only. getreg('=', 1) will return expression itself, not its result, if I remember it correctly. – Matt Jun 14 '20 at 4:23
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^@

The null byte 0x00. Due to various things at the source-code level, newlines get embedded as null bytes in certain things (not all strings, since you can use ^M, as you know).

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  • I would very much appreciate a more detailed answer that could explain why and when this occurs, but I don’t have it, so I’ll leave this here in the meantime – D. Ben Knoble♦ Jun 14 '20 at 3:34
  • Ben -- cool, yes I learned how to enter that in too, which was cool. So, would the best way to get the first line be to do: a[0:match(a, '^@')-1] ? That seems a bit hack-y but wasn't sure if there was a better way. – David542 Jun 14 '20 at 3:36
  • although when I actually run it in the function, echom match(a, '^@') that fails with a `Missing quote: '` (though it runs on the command input??) – David542 Jun 14 '20 at 3:47
  • @David542 honestly im not sure – D. Ben Knoble♦ Jun 14 '20 at 13:13

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