Get name of nearest tag to the cursor

Question

When I write an answer on this site, I often want to link to a part of Vim's :help pages; http://vimhelp.appspot.com/ has an online version of that.

However, I'm too lazy to manually lookup the page online, and add links for that.

What I want to do is somehow make Vim generate an valid URL to part of the helpfile I'm currently viewing. For example:

:echo WebHelp()
[`:help split`](http://vimhelp.appspot.com/windows.txt.html#%3Asplit)

The links on vimhelp.appspot seem to correspond to the same file & tags as Vim uses.

I know I can get the current file with :echo expand('%') (windows.txt in the above example), and I know how too url-encode string, but I'm not sure how to get the nearest tag the cursor is at? (:split)?

Answer 1

Tags in help files are enclosed within * characters. So to find the closest one above the current position I would search with

 ?\*[^*]\+\*

As there can be a number of such tags after the main/header tag, I would prefer to find one at end of line, and to then position the cursor after the first *

?\*\zs[^*]\+\*$

Then yank as far as the next *

y/\*

This leaves the most recent "header tag" copied to the buffer, whence it can be pasted into (what I assume is) your WebHelp() function