Convert sequence of external commands to a Vim custom command

Question

To reformat Markdown tables, I use the following sequence of external commands (e.g. after visually selecting my table lines):

:<,>! sed 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}\|/\#\|/g'
:<,>! column -t -s '\#'

The first command prefixes each | (Markdown column delimiter) with a #. The second command creates aligned columns using # as delimiter and removes it.

I also managed to combine those in a single command:

:<,>! sed 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}\|/\#\|/g' | column -t -s '\#'

Now, I would like to create the corresponding custom MDTableFormat command somewhere in my vimrc file:

command! -range MDTableFormat ...

but I can't find the proper syntax for this.

Answer 1

This syntax worked for me:

command! -range MDTableFormat <line1>,<line2>! sed 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}\|/\#\|/g' | column -t -s '\#'

Reading the documentation, I falsely assumed that -range was enough and <line1>,<line2> were placeholders for you to explicitly specify on which lines you wanted the command to apply.