How to "match until"?

Question

I have a CSV filled with text messages, and I want to be able to easily filter by sender/receiver. The last field indicates "SMS", "iMessage" or "WhatsApp"; the previous fields may spill over multiple lines.

E.g: "Sent","Aug 4, 2021 12:34:56","Some Person","+11234567890","Hello!","SMS"

So I can easily :g/.*Some Person.* to get everything with that person. But if the message ends up being long enough to spill over into multiple lines, I need to tell global to keep matching until it hits that last field. E.g.:

"Sent","Aug 4, 2021 12:34:56","Some Person","+11234567890","Hello!
Nice
to
see you","SMS"

I've tried things along the lines of:

:g/\"Sent.*Some Person\(.*\)\"SMS|\WhatsApp\|iMessage\"

however it seems like because the .* only matches until newline, this only matches one full line at most.

What's the correct way around this?

EDIT 1: I've also tried g:/.*some person.*\_\"imessage\|sms\|whatsapp\"\{-}: it matches lines that don't only contain "some person". I have ignorecase set.

EDIT 2: here's a sample.

"Received","Nov 26, 2021 15:00:28","Foo Bar cell","11234567890","A couple of words","WhatsApp"
"Sent","Nov 26, 2021 14:57:22","Foo Bar cell","11234567890","Word word word word
Sentence goes here
another ones goes here","WhatsApp"
"Sent","Nov 26, 2021 14:56:52","Dad Cell","11234567890","Word word word word. Word!","WhatsApp"

I should be able to search for messages from 'Foo Bar cell' and have it return lines one through four (the first two messages).

Answer 1

Match starting line by global. Then by range until the closing pattern.

g/"Some person"/,/"\(SMS\|iMessage\|WhatsApp\)"/p

Upd. If full match can consist of a single line only then we have to use a little longer construction. For example,

g/"Some person"/exe search('\v"(SMS|iMessage|WhatsApp)"', 'n')->printf(',%dp')

Answer 2

OK, lets do tricks. Suppose you don't have the word NEWLINE on your file. Then:

:%s/\n/NEWLINE/g
:%s/"NEWLINE"/\r/g

Then you can do

:g/\"Sent.*Some Person\(.*\)\"SMS|\WhatsApp\|iMessage\"

And finally, replace it back...

:%s/NEWLINE/\r/g

Answer 3

This might be overkill, but you can write vim script file with the following contents:

let col = 3
let pattern = 'Some Person'

let line = 1
let numlines = line('$')
while line <= numlines
    let str = getline(line)
    let entry = str
    let items = []
    while str != ""
        let item = matchstr(str, '^\("[^"]*",\?\|"[^"]*\|[^,]*,\|[^,]\+\)')
        let str = str[strlen(item):]
        if item =~ '^"[^"]*$'
            let line += 1
            while line <= numlines
                let str = getline(line)
                let entry .= "\n" . str
                let endquote = matchstr(str, '^[^"]*",\?')
                if endquote != ""
                    let item .= "\n" . endquote
                    let str = str[strlen(endquote):]
                    break
                else
                    let item .= "\n" . str
                    let line += 1
                endif
            endwhile
        endif
        let item = substitute(item, '^"\|",$\|"$\|,$', '', 'g')
        call add(items, item)
    endwhile
    if len(items) >= col && items[col - 1] =~ pattern
        echo entry
    endif
    let line += 1
endwhile

This script will parse the .csv using regexes. Then edit the variables col and pattern at the top to set which column you want to search, and what pattern to search for. Then open the .csv file in vim, then run the command:

source script.vim

and it will print the full entries that match the pattern.

Answer 4

You can solve this with positive look-ahead in your pattern. The positive look-ahead matches an atom without actually consuming the matched text. You can use it to define the structure of a CSV record with optional line breaks. After the record has been matched, the remaining text will again be searched for from the start of a record:

:g/^\(\("\(\_[^"]\|""\)*"\(,\|$\)\)*\)\@=.*Some Person.*/p

or, if Some Person may also be broken into two lines, use \_s instead of a simple space:

:g/^\(\("\(\_[^"]\|""\)*"\(,\|$\)\)*\)\@=.*Some\_sPerson.*/p

The first part of the pattern up to and including \@= matches a CSV record consisting of zero or more fields. Fields are delimited by quotes and can include any character (including new-lines) except quotes. Quotes inside a field need to be doubled. After a field a comma is expected to separate fields from each other, or an end-of-line must follow which terminates the record.

After a record has been found, the following .*Some\_sPerson.* is again tested from the start of the line.

If you want to restrict the matched record to those of specific message types (and the message type is in the last field), you need to modify the look-ahead part:

:g/^\(\("\(\_[^"]\|""\)*",\)*"\(SMS\|WhatsApp\|iMessage\)"$\)\@=.*Some Person.*/p

Note that you need parentheses around SMS\|WhatsApp\|iMessage. Otherwise any line that contains "WhatsApp" or "iMessage" will match.

Edit: You can get rid of most of the backslashes if you put \v at the start of the pattern. After that only the underscore needs a backslash for its special meaning:

:g/\v^(("(\_[^"]|"")*",)*"(SMS|WhatsApp|iMessage)"$)@=.*Some\_Person.*/p